Recently, reader Nicole D. was shopping at Home Depot and noticed a sign near the front that described ways employees are “empowered.” When we think of empowered employees, we might think of issues such as fair pay, decent benefits, access to full-time work, a way for employees to have input in the creation of workplace policies, or other factors that affect the work environment. But what struck Nicole was how being “empowered” was defined to align with corporate goals.
What are Home Depot employees empowered to do? To provide good customer service, basically — that is, to be “friendly and helpful to every customer,” to actually show customers what they’re looking for and “not point” to it, and to make sure Home Depot’s price-matching program is implemented:
In Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (2007), Rachel Sherman discusses how luxury hotels ensure the level of service their customers expect. Sherman writes, “Managers…face a difficult task. They must convince their employees…to go out of their way for guests, satisfying and surprising guests in largely intangible ways” (p. 63). Among other strategies, they encourage employees to break rules when necessary to provide the level of customer service their guests expected. This autonomy to circumvent certain rules in order to meet the larger goals of satisfying customers was seen by guests and employees as a mark of luxury service. Luxury service providers, such as the Ritz-Carlton, were in the forefront of the move to “empower” employees, an idea that has spread well beyond the luxury sector.
Sherman found that employees did value even seemingly minor forms of autonomy on the job. It made them feel like they had some power in the workplace. I know when I worked in food service, small things like getting to organize break schedules ourselves or decide what to offer as a special were highly appreciated. But Sherman shows that this language of autonomy can obscure the lack of specific changes that would have materially improved workers’ lives. For instance, while the luxury hotels she studied complained constantly about the difficulty of finding good staff, and framed their employees as intelligent professionals making autonomous decisions in order to serve guests’ needs, the jobs didn’t pay particularly well.
As Nicole pointed out, this a very limited form of empowerment. Employees might be given some autonomy, but it is to be used only in the service of improving outcomes for the corporation. In the case of Home Depot, some aspects of empowerment simply reframe externally-imposed requirements (such as being polite and helpful to customers) as forms of autonomy. The corporate discourse of empowerment presents it as synonymous with corporate goals. The wider array of factors that might empower workers are absent from the conversation, which frames empowerment entirely from the perspective of the company’s interest in providing better customer service without necessarily providing better pay, benefits, or other concrete improvements to workers’ lives.
Comments 20
Yrro Simyarin — July 16, 2012
This is the type of empowerment that the customer usually cares about, though. A large part of the reason for choosing to work with a smaller shop is that an owner-operator can bend the rules for your specific situation. "Empowered" service reps are able to do this to a degree as well.
Given that the reason for posting the sign is to inform customers, being "empowered" to solve your problem is likely to be more relevant to whether you are going to choose to shop at the store, if you are choosing your stores based on how effectively they provide you service.
Caren Young — July 16, 2012
It's also interesting if an employee doesn't do any one of the items they have been "empowered" to do, they - like children - are choosing to disobey.
brigidkeely — July 16, 2012
I worked at Home Depot and yes, we were chastised for pointing to things. We were supposed to "gesture" to give directions, or to walk customers to the area. But we also weren't supposed to leave OUR area because we were constantly understaffed, and could get into trouble/get written up for not being in our spots. so no matter what you did, it's wrong. Where I work now (not Home Depot) we're similarly "empowered." We can, for instance, chose to accept expired coupons. In fact, we're EXPECTED to, as part of customer service. The customers must be kept happy! But if we accept expired coupons, we also get dinged for accepting expired coupons because they're expired! And official policy (which we're encouraged to empowerdly ignore) is that we don't accept expired coupons. But if we refuse a coupon a a customer complains to management, we get in trouble for not accepting the coupon. PS, we're understaffed, underpaid, expected to do the work of several people, and don't get (meager) benefits until we've been with the company a full year. Our location, during a time of recession and huge unemployment, has huge turnover because it's so stressful to work there.
In general, when I see verbage that employees are "empowered," it's a signal that the employees actually have NO power but are expected to work themselves to the bone and do conflicting things at the same time. IE, to be able to walk a customer to find an item while also remaining at their station. It's really frustrating because I LOVE providing customer service. I LOVE helping customers find things, suggesting solutions, solving problems for customers. I enjoy it! But it's frustrating, and insulting, to say that I'm "empowered" to do something that I will, in fact, be reprimanded for... and then my empowered self will have to submit to being searched before leaving for the day because the base assumption is that people in retail steal. So empowered!
decius — July 16, 2012
Allowing service employees the authority to break the rules when they feel that breaking the rules is warranted is empowering (in the limited sense, not the general sense) and results in significantly happier employees, as compared to the option of having employees who think that the rules are limiting their ability to provide the level of service that they want to.
Enforcing a rule against everyone equally provides no chance to exercise agency, while allowing for even small amounts of discretion in applying policies provides a disproportionate amount of perceived agency. It isn't a cure-all technique that will allow the employer to pay peanuts and have bad conditions while still avoiding employee turnover.
Trilby — July 16, 2012
This is why workers are often referred to as "wage slaves".
guest — July 16, 2012
"Dr. Bridget Juniper, writing for the May 2012 issue of
Occupational Health, is a passionate advocate of the importance of
employee wellbeing versus employee engagement. Dr. Juniper is convinced
that this focus will improve workplace performance."
http://www.mykelly.us/eprise/main/web/us/mykelly/en/careertips_july2012_wellbeing
As if it's an either/or choice.
Gilbert Pinfold — July 16, 2012
There is an interesting contradiction building in the corporate world between this idea of limited discretion to exercise initiative in customer service and the ongoing infantilization of the workforce.
The latter comes from contemporary 'best practice' of procedurizing every last aspect of a job; leaving nothing to supposedly subjective notions such as commonsense. Industrial relations law has become a kind of game: Where does it say in the 'standards and behaviours' manual that I can't pick my nose? This loophole is duly fixed and the lawyers suggest also inserting 'scratch ass', 'rub balls' and 'eat earwax' among the prohibitions; and so it goes on until the belly-button lint incident...
Into this over-regulated environment, some employers try to inject 'empowerment'. Its a recipe for confusion and further alienation.
Empowerment versus Amazon? | Social Proof — July 17, 2012
[...] might be tempted to think that empowering your front-line staff might be the answer to the threat of Amazon, but understand that front-line staff could give away [...]
Empowerment (Don’t Just Point!), The Failed Meritocracy, A Pregnant Lady in Charge? « Miscellany, Etc. — July 17, 2012
[...] Neat blurb about employee empowerment and how it’s been completely reframed to mesh with employer needs–definitely something to think about as we consider how we want to keep restructuring our culture. You know, I had to take this (completely insulting to my intelligence) course called “Success and Study Skills.” Maybe it’s because community colleges often train students in a more vocational capacity, but it was incredible to what extent the workaholic, corporate culture was present in the textbook. The author kept exhorting the value of finding a career you were happy with, since you’d have to go to work 50 weeks per year. How does that sound at all reasonable? How can a person be happy when they spend the majority of their productive years helping someone else have a comfortable life while they’re barely getting by? What’s so horrible about the European model, with way more vacation time? It’s not like we need to spend as much time doing work to be productive, the rate of productivity in modern times has been through the roof! [...]
Guest — July 19, 2012
The Home Depot sign is written as if the audience is employees, but the audience is actually both customers and employees. So it conflates two different things: customer service expectations, which benefit the customer and the company but not necessarily the employee, and empowerment of the employee, which benefits the employee and the customer but not necessarily the company.
I worked in a retail environment known for having very demanding and entitled customers. Our company paid very little but there were so many highly skilled people in need of jobs that even the part-time cashiers were almost all university-educated and had additional expertise in our field (such as management experience in another retailer in the same field). We put up with the hard hours, low wages and difficult customers because we were empowered in a way I've rarely seen in retail.
We were never, ever reprimanded for making a customer happy. Creative solutions, even if they were expensive, were encouraged. We were also empowered to stop dealing with customers who crossed the line and became abusive, which did wonders for our emotional health. The thrill of solving a customer's difficult problem was very satisfying, and motivated me much more than pay or perks could have done.
While this did help the company immensely in creating a reputation for excellent service, it was a serious perk to us at the store level, too--unlike so many retail employees, we were recognized as high-functioning adults.
Moonbunnychan — July 23, 2012
I've noticed quite a terrible side effect of the "make the customer happy no matter what', in that I've noticed my customers at the store I've worked at the past 10 years getting more and more demanding and ridiculous. They now just expect me to break the rules and get uppity when I won't or can't. It's like we're training people that the fastest and best way to get what they want is to throw a tantrum like a child.
Dchestnut — August 27, 2012
The notion that companies only care about what pleases customers and the bottom line is about to change. Although in it’s infancy, new concept called Income
Reengineering idealizes a complete “large scale” transformation from the
old industrial age wage-based compensation infrastructure to a new
compensation model called the Empowered Employee Compensation Model
(EECM). The EECM strongly emphasizes and accents employee empowerment by
replacing traditional wage-based compensation with ten (10) new income
streams, which are anchored in productivity and ownership based
principles as well as collaborative financial benefits. This new compensation will naturally motivate employees to go out of their way to please customers and help the corporate bottom line because it helps their bottom line in terms of productivity and ownership based compensation. You can learn more about this at http://www.incomereengineering.com