Empowering Your Employees to Own Their Work

Job ownership is an attitude of excellence, achievement and expertise, and having empowered people is crucial to the success of any company. But if you want your employees to live up to their full potential, it’s not enough that they do what you tell them to. Ideally, you want the members of your team to see that the goals they are pursuing belong to them. You want them to be fully responsible and accountable for their work. This is what ownership is all about. Owning a task means that regardless of how trivial or mundane the task, the employee will go above and being their job description to accomplish it. So how do you encourage employee ownership? Akhtaboot provides you with a number of tips to help you promote task ownership among your employees.

Encourage Open and Honest Communication

Organizations that follow the traditional top to bottom communication lines make it hard for their employees to speak up. Even when they gather enough guts to give their opinions, they may feel like their input won’t be taken into consideration and after a while, you will have silent employees. In order to encourage ownership, you need to encourage open communication lines. Welcome input and new ideas, even if you don’t like all of it. Keep in mind that you won’t find the game changers if you don’t explore new ideas.

Be Transparent With Your Employees

Your employees need to understand the vision of your company. It’s never enough to ask them to follow you; you need to explain why the goal they’ve been assigned has value or how it fits into the bigger picture. No one ever really commits to a goal if they don’t see why it’s desirable for them to do it in the first place. It’s your job as a leader to nurture the attitude of job ownership by validating it in writing and explaining what is it and how to do it while detailing the benefits. Don’t assume the “why” is as obvious to your team as it is to you. You need to effectively communicate it as an expectation to the current team and to potential hires.

Even Great Employees Make Mistakes

While mistakes allow individuals to learn and grow, they can also be very costly to any company. That’s why many leaders hesitate to give their employees the autonomy to do certain tasks. What leaders need to understand is that mistakes are not failures, they are simply the process of eliminating ways that won’t work in order to come closer to the ways that will. Great leaders allow their people the freedom to make mistakes. But good employees are those who when mistakes are made, they learn from them, they own them, and they make sure they fix them. This is the true meaning of ownership!

Reward Ownership

Compensation packages are a big consideration for employees when they are hired at first, but once the deal has been made, the source of motivation tends to shift to other factors. These non-monetary motivations include the challenge of the work, the purpose of the work, the opportunity to learn, and the opportunity to contribute. This is a strong driver for individuals who are invested in professional and personal growth. A great way to encourage ownership among your employees is to design a personalized reward program that is separate from the salary scheme.