Implementing Employee Empowerment

otal quality management (TQM) is built on the four cornerstones of customer focus, continuous process improvement, management leadership, and employee empowerment. Although empowerment is often the most difficult of the four concepts to implement effectively, organizations that have been successful in empowering their employees invariably see bottomline improvements. Empowerment has been defined as that group of practices designed to drive day-to-day decision making to ever lower organizational levels. Such practices include implementing self-managed work teams, highly autonomous improvement teams, workers with ultimate responsibility for their own quality assurance, and highly empowered customer interface personnel. Empowered employees make decisions affecting their work and their customers, often as members of teams, and without constant supervisory review and approval. Ultimate success in implementing empowerment depends on the sincere commitment of both employees and management. It is the role of R&D managers to ensure that their organizations are truly on the road to commitment and not merely forcing compliance or heading toward chaos.