Empowerment
Provides employees, partners and customers of your organization with opportunities for voice, choice, representation. Empowerment practices recognize historical and systemic inequities and intentionally equip individuals to participate at the decision-making table in real and meaningful ways.
The Empowerment Approach
Agencies may play the role of educator, sharing information about an empowerment process, body or service, implementer, incorporating formal or informal opportunities for voice and power in their own work, or monitor/evaluator, making sure existing structures and regulations are being used to uplift and protect voice and power. Questions to ask:
Existence of Choice: Is choice both available and accessible?
Use of Choice: Is choice consistently and equitably used?
Achievement of Choice: Is the existence and use of choice accomplishing the desired result?
- Information gathering: Building the collection of perspectives, experiences and insights from those a program is intended to serve into the program design, operations and evaluation through surveys, focus groups, interviews or other tools
- Formal structures: Establishing a worker standards board or a dedicated workforce development board seat for worker representation
- Community representation: Providing referrals or connections to dedicated worker power organizations such as worker centers, local unions, and worker organizers
- Internal operations: Encouraging voluntary, employee-led resource groups (ERGs) based on shared backgrounds or interests that provide a platform for communication, advocacy, and support within your organization or the employers you work with.
- Employee ownership: Supporting companies looking to explore employee ownership transitions, such as through a business resource hub or the application of WIOA rapid response/layoff aversion funds to feasibility studies
To get started with empowerment, use the self assessment and quick start guide.
Get More Information
Provides employees, partners and customers of your organization with opportunities for voice, choice, representation. Empowerment practices recognize historical and systemic inequities and intentionally equip individuals to participate at the decision-making table in real and meaningful ways.
The Empowerment Approach
Agencies may play the role of educator, sharing information about an empowerment process, body or service, implementer, incorporating formal or informal opportunities for voice and power in their own work, or monitor/evaluator, making sure existing structures and regulations are being used to uplift and protect voice and power. Questions to ask:
Existence of Choice: Is choice both available and accessible?
Use of Choice: Is choice consistently and equitably used?
Achievement of Choice: Is the existence and use of choice accomplishing the desired result?
- Information gathering: Building the collection of perspectives, experiences and insights from those a program is intended to serve into the program design, operations and evaluation through surveys, focus groups, interviews or other tools
- Formal structures: Establishing a worker standards board or a dedicated workforce development board seat for worker representation
- Community representation: Providing referrals or connections to dedicated worker power organizations such as worker centers, local unions, and worker organizers
- Internal operations: Encouraging voluntary, employee-led resource groups (ERGs) based on shared backgrounds or interests that provide a platform for communication, advocacy, and support within your organization or the employers you work with.
- Employee ownership: Supporting companies looking to explore employee ownership transitions, such as through a business resource hub or the application of WIOA rapid response/layoff aversion funds to feasibility studies
To get started with empowerment, use the self assessment and quick start guide.
Get More Information
How government agencies can use empowerment:
Engagement
- Using human centered design practices to guide program development, implementation and assessment
- Engaging participants/customers directly in the development, implementation and evaluation of the work, compensating for their time
- Leveraging trusted communicators to convey messaging or collect feedback
- Conducting focus groups or worker voice surveys to better understand local needs
- Creating employee resource groups within a business or organization or worker boards within local government structures to inform the work
- Reporting back to those who shared their insights on progress in implementing feedback
- Acknowledging potential power imbalances between workforce agency and grantees
Capacity Building
- Funding or conducting training for community representatives to serve as evaluators
- Exploring sabbatical programs to enable staff to refresh and renew their thinking
- Creating nonprofit apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship programs to enable BIPOC talent to enter the field without being forced to trade economic mobility for job experience
- Supporting worker organizing activities
Continuous Learning
- Joining associations to support worker organizing, worker power or related activities
- Learning more about employee ownership models and how your organization can implement or support them
Funding
- Providing incentives (financial or process) for co-design of evaluation measures as those carrying out the work know the space best
- Embedding necessary funds for training/capacity building of populations in budget/grant proposal to support human centered design and related processes
- Funding employee ownership model feasibility studies
👋 Learn How to Implement the Empowerment Lever
STEP 3
Selected your lever(s)? Now move on to documenting your goals.