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Empower resources

Empower workers for more decision-making authority

Give workers most of the decision-making authority instead of relying on middle management

Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)

Description

In conventional processes, significant time is used to approve others' work. Granting employees autonomy can lead to streamlined operations and quicker workflows.

Example

To streamline the insurance claim process, resources are empowered to make decisions in place of middle management, reducing approval bottlenecks.

Implementation

To empower resources, gather information about their capability, productivity, collaboration, and utilisation. Based on this information, identify resources capable of making decisions and provide them with the necessary authority. Communicate the reasons behind the decision to empower resources and the expectations and constraints associated with the decision-making authority.

Performance considerations

However, this approach might yield lower decision quality and miss obvious errors. When mistakes demand rework, costs may surpass the initial setup.

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Foundational free Patterns

Assign cases

Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Shift Workload

Execute tasks when the grid is powered by renewable energy

Human Process Performance

Consider whether it is eco-friendly to let humans work over machines

Offer Customer self-service

Offer customers the possibility to serve themselves

Workload-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on individuals' incomplete workload

Constraint-based task assignment

Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints

Performance-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success

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Connected to

First-contact problem resolution

Establish a one-contact resolution for customer issues

Deploy extra resources

If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources

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