Driving people to feel they belong in the workplace for some is a mystery. Measuring that feeling in relation to belonging typically shows up in employee engagement surveys. The trouble is, most employees don't honestly answer those surveys — fearing a backlash or more team-building sessions if the organization scores low.
Instead, our recommendation is that employers engage with their teams about empowerment, and how it is impacted by workforce differences. How we feel as people is central to driving empowerment, which is about authority and power connected to people.
After more than eight years of research asking 1,000 workers worldwide what empowerment means to them, I found passion and other human-centric feelings among 85% of the responses. Other examples included communication, trust, empathy, confidence and decision making. Each of them was extremely hard to measure and judge, which is why it is difficult to convey the full impact of human feelings on others.
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The remaining 15% mentioned items that were easy to measure and judge since most of them had a built-in numeric calculation. They were mostly about time or money related to their success or connection to other people and also emotional in nature. This survey confirmed my suspicion that the definition could be validated by people's responses. As a result, emotional answers that were hard to measure became "authority" and numeric responses were "power" since that is measured by a numeric value.
Following the initial survey, I realized a need to turn my passion project of helping people better understand empowerment into something that would be accessible for everyone. Driving success for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs or helping people seek and obtain a sense of belonging is different from one individual to the next because we are each so different. The focus of our full research shifted toward empowerment as we learned that people around the world would never shy away from opportunities to be more empowered.
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That discovery was something that I could relate to from my own experiences with homelessness. Who in that position wouldn't jump at the chance to be empowered to pursue a better life? The same holds true, however, for affluent individuals who also would gladly accept more opportunities for empowerment to build on their wealth. In seeking to help employers develop more impactful teams, it very much matters how that effort is branded and marketed.
For example, I named my company with the word "empowerment" in mind after anticipating winds of change against DEI programs and those adding "belonging" at the end of that acronym. My objective was to center the approach to helping people around a basic concept of learning and leadership. We added the word "differences" because several senior leaders I interacted with felt that they were not diverse. Remember that each person's differences will impact how the information is received. These differences require leaders to have awareness and measurement toward how they are being impacted in the workplace and beyond.
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The final part of our research on empowerment centered around leadership actions and which actions people should take when empowering certain differences. We formed focus groups on each of the top 10 differences we have as humans. They included ability/attributes, age, class, education, ethnicity, gender, language, race, religion and sexuality. Each group discussed all the leadership actions that were done for them or they did for others but specifically to the topic they were assigned.
The findings gathered from these focus groups were turned into 10 empowering actions, along with a prioritization for each difference we have as humans. How we empower someone's potential requires a different action than language empowerment and so on. This means that in order for people to feel like they truly belong, we must know how they feel about empowerment, how their differences are impacted and what actions are needed to help impact them independently.
What we learned is that empowered employees produce 86% more work than those who are not empowered. Bear in mind that according to the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, entrepreneurial businesses' second-most pressing issue is not empowering their people. So there's clearly a need for more work in this emerging area. Demand for employee analytics will only increase as the number of people on this planet and our differences continues to grow. Given this backdrop, the time has come to leverage empowerment for people as a way to drive and measure success for your employer clients.
