Empowered Employees: Taking the reigns from management
John Fiegenbaum
Operations Management BUS 453A
Ty Bettis
Warner Pacific College
December 12, 2013

Abstract
Though there are many challenges, trends, and ever-changing issues facing operations managers these days, we simply cannot cover all of them adequately; so this paper will focus primarily on the topic of empowered employees in the work force; who, by throwing off the yokes and taking the reigns from management to take care of the customer on the front line help to increase the bottom line.

Empowered Employees: Taking the reigns from management
Empowered employees are the first line of continuous quality improvement that can determine how well or how dissatisfied a customer’s experience can be. By definition, empowered employees generally “means the process of allowing employees to have input and control over their work, and the ability to openly share suggestions and ideas about their work and the organization as a whole. Empowered employees are committed, loyal and conscientious” (Richards, 2013). As global expansion and local availability combine and require the need for knowledge and competence in a more technically demanding workplace; operations managers are answering this need by moving more of the decision-making ability to the individual worker. This means giving up some of the power traditionally held by management, through a restructuring of an organization’s hierarchy to provide a more customer-focused organization; this is “viewed as an inverted triangle of organizational power”, where “customers are at the top while management is in a support role at the bottom” (Okes & Westcott, 2001).

Also, some of the requirements of employee empowerment are: * Training in the skills necessary to carry out the additional responsibilities * Access to information on which decisions