According to a Harvard Business Review analysis released in September, U.S. companies are wasting more than $3 trillion every year on excess bureaucracy and management — which is equivalent to 17 percent of our country’s GDP.
That’s an astonishing amount of money, and I believe one of the keys to reversing this trend is addressing a structure that has been an American business mainstay for decades: the corporate ladder.
Today, traditional top-down management can hold companies back. It slows down decision-making, holds back brilliant talent from making an impact and can create an unnecessary single point of failure within each department: a middle manager who is held accountable for delivering all directives and approving all of his or her team’s projects and finished products.
Related: “What Happens When You Empower Employees Instead of Micromanage Them?”
Now that many mass communication and collaboration tools exist to facilitate real-time company-wide work, it’s time to remove the excess layers of approval from your business and thoughtfully empower each individual contributor to take action based on his or her skills and capabilities. Here’s how:
1. Modernize your company through empowerment.
In today’s fast-paced world, a company’s decision-making process needs to be streamlined, swift and agile. The traditional corporate hierarchy hampers all of these things. Its numerous layers cause traditional companies to move at a snail’s pace when making decisions and reacting to market conditions.
Embracing employee empowerment won’t just accelerate your company’s rate of innovation; it will lead to happier teams and attract free-thinking and creative job-seekers to your brand.
That’s important because many of those job-seekers will be millennials. In one study, 76 percent of millennials surveyed reported being more satisfied within a creative, inclusive work culture, while only 28 percent felt that the companies they worked for were making full use of their skills.
The message? You currently have a huge opportunity to attract these future all-stars.
Not that that opportunity will be easy: It takes hard work and dedication to create a culture of autonomous, empowered employees — and that certainly won’t happen overnight. My organization, Lifion, is devoted to achieving this type of atmosphere in our own workplace, and we are excited to help others do the same as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
These three strategies are our focus areas as we progress on this journey:
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