How do you like this site? We would love to hear from you! Take a short survey or

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.

Share this pattern

Enjoy these

Foundational free Patterns

Appoint case managers

Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type

Distinguish case types

Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes

Apply Integral technology

Elevate physical constraints by applying new technology

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Apply triage

Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities

Green Variant

Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

Back

Share this

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

What's Happening?