Did you know that businesses lose up to $550 billion each year due to employee disengagement?

Another study suggested that a highly engaged workforce is 202% more productive than a business reeling with low employee engagement.

Do you get the point?

Trusting employees supports better performance in an organization.

However, even with all that theory and research,

a large chunk of businesses fail to understand the importance of empowering employees in the workplace.

How about a real-life example?

Some time back, I was working with an e-learning company in a leadership role.

Their CEO, although excellent in his niche, liked to interfere in possibly every decision.

Remember, there is a fine line between “guiding” and “interfering”.

He suggested that the business send 300,000 emails 3-5 times a week to the same set of customers.

I am sure if you understand email marketing, or for that matter, have common sense,

you will agree that email blast is a strict No-No today.

Empowering Employees in the Workplace Saves Money

The CAN-SPAM and GDPR guards are vigilant!

Now, my entire team immediately discussed with me that

this approach could alienate their customers, and even possibly lead to blacklisting.

Hence, as their leader,

I took it on myself to inform and educate the CEO about these repercussions.

Sadly and unfortunately,

he did not agree with this and informed us that he understands his customers better than anyone else does.

The result was not unexpected, but truly unfortunate.

Just after sending the second batch of 300k emails, the email marketing platform blacklisted the business.

The Marketing and the IT teams spent the next few weeks on-boarding a new email marketing platform since the existing vendor’s audit found breaches pertaining to the CAN-SPAM Act.

Email marketing platforms can even ask to reveal the time stamps of the user subscription to validate if a user signed up (gave their consent) to the email newsletter or not.

The bottom line took a major blow by this fiasco,

and the revenue for the next two weeks was down by around 12%,

with website traffic dropping significantly as well.

Empowering Employees in the Workplace: TRUST!

Why is trust so important between employees and employers?

Empowering employees in the workplace is extremely important.

The CEO should have trusted the skills and judgment of the email marketing professional in the marketing team.

The lack of trust between management and employees can be detrimental to the company’s growth.

Had he trusted the skills and judgment of the marketing team, the business could have averted these losses.

Building trust and respect with employees

As a business owner or a manager,

you should learn how to empower employees to take ownership and make decisions at the workplace.

Hiring intelligent, smart and capable workers

makes no sense if you tell them what to do at every step.

Leadership is a powerful gift and skill.

But being able to handle that responsibility is even more challenging.

As leaders, we need to understand the importance of trust in the workplace.

I always encourage business to conduct empowerment activities for employees.

Having a positive, empowered team goes a long way.

What are your thoughts on this?

Have you come across a situation where your manager did not trust your judgment?

Leave your comments below, and spread the word.