More Than Teamwork: Encouraging Employee Autonomy in Your Business

The heart of every successful business is arguably one simple thing: the customer. Without them, your team and company are lost. What we have to remember is that when we’re engaging with customers, a well-armed employee who has the knowledge at their fingertips can deliver better service, but of course, there’s a number of different reasons why our not able to give our employees what they truly need. 

We can chalk it down to budget, we can focus on a lack of resources internally, but the fact is, we can almost spend a lot of time pinning blame on our customer service agents and those on the front line. So what is the answer? It’s autonomy. 

When employees feel trusted to make their own choices and manage their work, you’ll see greater creativity, efficiency, and actually a lot of satisfaction. So let’s help you encourage autonomy in the workplace:

Tools That Encourage Seamless Access

Tools like SearchBlox make information access easier by enabling simple data searches, and in an organization where employees can quickly find data or documents they need, you’re going to reduce bottlenecks, and therefore you’re going to solve the customer problem in record time. 

A product like this is an advanced search platform, and of course, when you’ve got a customer service agent on the telephone and they have the ability to know where to look for information, it doesn’t necessarily matter if they know it inherently or not. 

A tool like this can also be very useful to encourage autonomy with customers, but when we minimize wasted time and ultimately confusion, employees can self-serve and act independently, regardless of what they’re doing, whether it’s serving customers, onboarding, or innovating.

Set Clear Measurable Goals

When you compare strict task-based management with goal-oriented leadership, this highlights a vital contrast. While tasks may track productivity, the goals are going to drive purpose and your direction. The benefit of clear goals is about gaining more focus, and so then your employees are going to know what is expected, and then they can choose their own path to success. 

A lot of organizations focus more on process, and then we can bring in so many different aspects of thinking and other methodologies here, so this could be Kanban or Six Sigma. But if you want to encourage employee autonomy, we can’t train everybody in lean manufacturing methods. Instead, we provide a really clear goal and trust that our employees will actually reach it in their own way. After all, what does it matter what the process is as long as your employees know how to get to the end result? 

So define what autonomy looks like in your organization, and then tie it to measurable objectives so employees have the freedom to experiment confidently with boundaries that serve a real purpose. It’s not about encouraging them to completely go off the rails, because this means we can go very far off track.

There are so many other things that you could implement, like rewarding autonomous efforts or building a culture of trust, but what we need to remember is that it’s not about loosening the standards. Encouraging employee autonomy is about enabling smart and ultimately motivated people to do their best work.

More Than Teamwork: Encouraging Employee Autonomy in Your Business