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Creating an Empowered Work Culture: A Guide to Employee Ownership

Creating an employee-owned culture allows for authenticity, innovation, and creativity. Employee enablement is crucial to avoid engagement and cynicism issues. Meaningful diversity and leadership development play key roles, and culture change can happen faster than traditionally believed. The article encourages organizations to embrace employee input and offers resources for further learning.

In the article “How to build an employee-owned work culture,” Frank Devine suggests shifting from a top-down approach to empowering employees to take ownership of a high-performance culture:

Stop wasting time trying to sell culture change to employees. Instead, focus on empowering your people to take ownership of a high-performance culture themselves.

When seeking to create a high-performance culture, the conventional approach to making this change is ‘top-down’. It involves senior leadership codifying the new culture and then exhausting themselves in a relentless effort to ‘sell’ it to employees.

There are often elements of employee voice in this process, but the key decisions and the specific words used to articulate the new culture are decided upon by this senior group or its advisors.

Why launch culture change from the top-down, however, when a widespread and deep employee commitment to such a culture can be created much quicker and more sustainably by the employees themselves?

Why create an employee-owned culture?

The advantages of a bottom-up approach are summarised in the table below:

* table illustrating advantage of bottom-up approach sourced from “How to build an employee-owned work culture”

How do employees create their own culture?

To maximise authenticity and employee ownership of the new culture, a number of key prerequisites are needed:

Employees must not merely be ‘consulted’ or ‘involved’ in the codification of the new culture, they must make decisions,

Employees must be empowered to pursue innovative and creative policy changes in a scientific and structured way.

Any existing management policies, such as corporate value systems, should not limit the scope and thus the creativity, of these decisions,

All employees, not merely a cross-section, need to make the decisions. This prevents anyone saying afterwards “I didn’t decide this culture/these behavioural standards”.

To equip this culture to succeed in highly competitive markets, it must deliver high-performance and continuous improvement. The new culture’s role is to both sustain the gains made in the early stages and to equip the organisation to better meet future, and currently unknown, challenges.

Creating an Empowered Work Culture: A Guide to Employee Ownership

Why create an employee-owned culture?

How do employees create their own culture?

Read more here

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