How much involvement should your employees have in the decision making process

Whenever you are in a business management situation, you must decide how much involvement you should allow your employees to have in decision making in your business. You may decide that they should have full decision making abilities. You may decide that you don't want to give your employees any decision making powers. Instead you may opt to retain all the decision making power. However this may make your life a bit stressful since you will be micro-managing your company. So let's discuss exactly how much involvement your employees should have in the decision making process.

If you want your employees to be involved in the business and therefore decision making, a good approach is to develop a "partner" profile. You can start by defining the critical attitudes, behaviors, skills, and understanding an employee needs in order to think and act like a business partner. These elements can then be used in a survey to identify how closely the employee population conforms to the "ideal" partner.

A company moving toward a partner oriented, high performance culture may want to sort the survey into essential business categories. For example, a survey may consist of Cultural, Business, and Finance categories. The questions in each category should focus on the types of attitudes, behaviors and understanding necessary for success in that category.

There are many reasons for the increased effectiveness of involving employees. They can be a great aid in solving problems. Their involvement can help improve relations between other employees. For example, let's say that you move a team at the production or service delivery levels and you leave middle and upper management unchanged. It should not surprise you when friction develops between the teams and the rest of the organization. These difficulties exert pressures that then cause the employees to fail in their tasks. However, if you involve both levels in the decision making process, they have a much better chance of success.

There are several basic issues underlying an organization's effectiveness in involving its employees in the decision making process. You should understand those issues in order to help you begin strategies that will improve your company/employee effectiveness in making decisions. There are five basic points you should consider:
1. Direction of Information Flow
2. Breadth of Information Sharing
3. Range of Knowledge and Skills
4. Locus of Decision Making
5. Task Performance and Accountability

So, what might these points mean for your business? First, think about where you are. Using these points, you can now develop an assessment method. This would be able to identify how involved your employees are allowed should be today. It might even allow you to allow your employees to begin to develop strategies for moving toward a more decision making.
Remember that occasional involvement in decision making is worse for your employees than no involvement. With occasional involvement, your employees only get a taste of the type of things they need to consider in decision making. This may allow them to make bad decisions rather than good ones. But if they have been involved on a regular basis they are much more likely to make good decisions. Here are some questions you may want to ask yourself when considering more involvement for your employees in making decisions.

1. How "involving" is your organization ? What kinds of things can you do to make it more involving?
2. Does it make sense to even think about allowing your employees more decisions making power? Does your company need it?
3. How would your company benefit by allowing your employees more decision making power?

Think about it.

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