Three Steps Managers Can Take to Empower Workers

“Employee empowerment” is a popular buzzword, and organizations obviously benefit if employees share good ideas for improving the workplace and managers act on them. What’s more, recent research indicates that workers who feel they don’t have enough say on the job have lower job satisfaction and well-being, a higher risk of burnout, and a greater likelihood of quitting. 

However, employee empowerment programs aren’t always easy to implement effectively in the workplace, particularly if they involve frontline workers in hierarchical organizations putting forth ideas to improve the organization.  What practical steps can managers take to give employees, particularly frontline employees, more say in their workplace?

That’s one of the questions Arrow Minster explored in their recent MIT Sloan doctoral dissertation  in the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) PhD program. For the dissertation, which is titled “Closing the Voice Gap: Evidence from a Hospital System’s Empowerment Program,” Minster conducted an in-depth, 17-month ethnographic study of an empowerment program for frontline employees at a large, unionized hospital system located on the East Coast of the U.S.  Minster, who earned their PhD in 2024 and is now an assistant professor at the Lam Family College of Business at San Francisco State University, studied the implementation of the program in eight departments of the hospital system.

The empowerment program at the hospital system Minster studied had been jointly developed by labor and management at the hospital, and it involved the creation of committees within departments to identify and solve workplace problems. Each committee was co-led by a frontline employee (such as an administrative employee in billing or scheduling or a medical assistant), and committee membership was voluntary. The aim of the program was to improve employee engagement and help employees feel better about work by addressing employees workplace concerns. 

That was the formal structure. Through this research, Minster surfaced a number of challenges the program faced, such as the additional work it created for participants and employees’ fears of speaking up. Minster also identified both formal and informal practices that were needed to make the program work smoothly. 

One of Minster’s findings is that department managers played a key role in whether changes that workers sought in the committees got made. In particular,  managers who were effective at encouraging empowerment on the committees made three moves, in a process Minster calls “crafting empowerment.” These three important managerial moves were, Minster wrote, “prioritizing the issue, centering a diagnostic dialogue, and engaging with task assignments.” 

Here’s what that meant in practice:

1. Prioritizing the issue. This involved the manager both publicly endorsing an issue raised by a worker as something that should be on the committee’s agenda. and, more generally, by encouraging attendance at the problem-solving committee’s meetings.
2. Centering a diagnostic dialogue. Once an employee had raised a workplace concern that the manager prioritized, a constructive action for managers was to bring in other people’s perspectives so that the problem could be fully understood and addressed. “This broadening of the issue beyond one’s individual scope made it possible to identify the multiple root causes of the issue, rather than only one’s own,” Minster wrote. Minster also observed that managers who were effective at facilitating this diagnostic dialogue actually talked a lot during the process, as they synthesized various views and helped the committee members identify the root causes of a problem.
3. Engaging with task assignments. For change to happen, managers had to help identify appropriate tasks and next steps and get them assigned to individuals—including taking on tasks themselves. 

“When managers made these moves, workers were able to influence the changes they wanted to see,” Minster observed. More generally, Minster concludes from their research that managers have an important role to play in making empowerment programs effective. “An organization cannot merely give workers the tools for power,” Minster wrote. Instead, Minster concluded, higher-ranking individuals such as managers “must help workers leverage opportunities to have influence over change.”