Few people enjoy being micromanaged, and few employees prefer reporting on their job instead of actually doing their job. It’s hard to reduce the hassle-factor for customers when your own team’s experience is hassle-filled instead of hassle-free.

Look at the processes that have accreted in your organization over time and which take your employees’ time away from serving customers.

• How many signatures does process X need?
• How many forms does process Y take?
• How many layers of escalation does situation Z require?

While the devil is inevitably in the empowerment details, one of the fundamental early steps is looking at the time your team spends trying to get its job done instead of the time it spends actually getting its job done.

Actual empowerment can be broken down into two types: job enlargement (horizontal) and job enrichment (vertical). When looking at empowerment, evaluate opportunities both horizontally and vertically.

• Job Enlargement (horizontal) — Expanding job responsibilities to include more responsibilities typically found at the same level. For instance, the employee is no longer constrained by helping customers in their own department but in every part of the service floor.
• Job Enrichment (vertical) — Expanding job responsibilities to include responsibilities typically found at a higher level of the organization. For example, the same employee is now given the ability to process customer refunds without a manager signature.

If your culture has not been one of empowerment, turning the ship around will take time. Team members will need to accept that they can make decisions on behalf of the customer’s welfare without negative repercussions. They need to feel psychologically empowered and to do that they have to feel that you trust them to make decisions.

Many of the ideas that follow will help communicate this trust in different ways, but one of the easiest and best ways to help employees feel empowered is to tell them “Do what you think is best; I trust your judgement.”

You can always add guidance and still deliver the same message: “I would avoid going down that road but it’s your call. Do what you think is best.”

Nothing communicates trust like an employee asking for permission or advice and being told that you have faith in them to handle it. But remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The less empowered they have been in the past, the more difficult it will be to make them truly feel empowered.

In most industries, inexpensive concessions can be made at many points throughout the customer experience:

• ​A refund for a product that did not meet your customer’s expectations
• A “comped” service due to an error made by the company
• A free replacement part for a recently purchased product
• A complimentary service upgrade because the appointment was double-booked
• A $5 gift card to the nearest coffee shop to make a customer’s wait a little less annoying

While empowerment transcends mere monetary solutions, giving employees the ability to resolve issues on the spot with some sort of compensatory gesture can be a powerful tool in preventing issue escalation. This is the principle the Ritz Carlton uses with its $2,000 Rule.

I used a similar principle many, many years ago in a retail service business of mine. Like many small businesses, we had controls in place that required escalation for most refunds or comps. It was obvious that it wasn’t working. Management time was being taken up and customers were waiting days for a resolution, sometimes over just a few dollars.

So, we tried giving every front desk employee the ability to comp a number of levels of service up to and including a full refund. We created a simple online form that they could fill out on the spot to report what they gave and why (less than a minute to fill out).

We decided we would test it for a few months to make sure that the program was financially viable. It was a complete success. Our team was more protective of “giving away the store” than we ever would have been, and the number of issues that were resolved on the spot and did not both result in further frustration and hassle for the customer or take up valuable supervisor time increased significantly.

Creating an allowance for resolving customer issues is great but you also want to allow for creativity in creating positive proactive customer experiences. It was empowered employees who created this great birthday surprise for my wife at the Hotel Indigo in Asheville, NC.

It was an empowered employee who made national news because he stopped to teach a young man buying a tie for his first job interview how to tie it.

None of these great customer experiences would have occurred in an environment where the team members were not able to make such gestures without fear of being second guessed.

With empowerment, it’s easy to set it and forget it. Once you’ve granted the empowerment, it is easy to think that it will take care of itself. This is often a dangerous way to think.

From the standpoint of risk, you will always have unintended consequences that you can’t foresee. No matter how hard you tired to evaluate the risks before granting certain authority and responsibility, you were still forecasting. Once it’s being used in the real world, you have to monitor it to make sure that risks you did not foresee have not arisen.

On the execution side, it’s very easy for empowerment to be forgotten, for systems to fall into disuse. In the previous example, where we granted empowerment in one of my retail businesses, after many years of successful use, I noticed that the reports were no longer coming in. Since I wasn’t actively managing the operations of the business, it took awhile before I caught it. It turns out that employees were not using the empowerment they had been given, and we had to do a reboot to get it rolling again.

Customer feedback can be powerful when integrated with employee empowerment. First, the feedback can be used as a coaching tool to help identify areas where the authority could have been used differently or more effectively.

Second, it can help give management frontline feedback on where empowerment might be useful. Imagine this conversation between a district manager and a store team:

“Why do we keep getting complaints that customers have to wait around, sometimes for up to a half hour, to get a refund form. This doesn’t happen at any of the other stores in our district.”

“The reason is the forms are in the manager’s office which she locks when she goes to lunch.”

You’ve identified a problem and an easy solution where some form of empowerment (the front lines are given the form, the assistant manager gets a key to the office, etc.) can easily prevent the issue.

In a similar vein, it is important to involve employees in developing their own empowerment. According to Luis Delfin, co-author of a study performed by Gopesh Anand and Dilip Chhajed, executives should not simply push new “employee empowerment programs” down to the front lines.

“Workers need to have a sense of control over their work environment. They need to be able to decide how and what to do in their day-to-day work. And that’s actually what motivates them to improve. Their buy-in becomes even stronger when leadership provides them the support to do this.”

Collaborate with your teams on what authority they need to better serve customers. If empowerment comes from on high, from a vacuum that does not take into account the attitudes of the empowered, you may find that the autonomy you give them is not the autonomy they need.

Collaborate with your teams on the empowerment process; you will get buy-in and valuable feedback as to what is needed.

All the autonomy and authority in the world is wasted if an employee does not have the training or desire to use it to create better customer experiences. If an employee does not operate in a culture that tells him or her to look for opportunities to make the customer happy, to look for ways to solve the customer’s issue before it quickly snowballs into a more serious one, the empowerment they have at their disposal will sit idly and will be of no benefit to them or your customers.

Make sure that your team doesn’t keep its authority parked in the proverbial garage and that they take it out and drive it regularly.