Rethinking Empowerment in the Workplace
By Chelsea Jones
“At Rockwood, our people continue to be exceptional and thrive and grow as professionals benefiting from an empowered employee experience.”
This powerful statement from our CEO launched an important dialogue on Rockwood’s 2025 Strategy and Vision Statement. Specifically, what does an empowered employee experience truly look like? And how do we scale this experience to create a workplace where individuals and teams unlock their inherent power, innovate, and drive meaningful change?
Empowerment is not about giving people power—it’s about creating an environment where they can use the power they already have. This is especially important for historically excluded groups, including neurodivergent individuals and those with disabilities who face systemic barriers that can limit their opportunities to thrive. An empowered workplace begins with acknowledging and valuing the unique contributions and potential of every individual while fostering the conditions for them to act, innovate, and succeed. Leadership’s role is to create the right conditions for individuals to express and harness their inherent capabilities.
Yet in many organizations, systemic barriers and rigid power structures often limit employees’ ability to act, innovate, and lead. Barriers like unclear decision-making, rigid hierarchies, and complex processes stifle creativity and momentum. For example, employees may hesitate to act because they lack trust in leadership, fear failure in a blame-focused environment, or feel constrained by a bureaucracy that requires approval for every decision. In these situations, instead of enabling employees, these systems may limit their ability to use their skills, voice, and power effectively.
Leaders who recognize these barriers and actively work to dismantle them create a space where employees can thrive. Rigid processes limit innovation, but leaders who simplify systems create teams that act with confidence and agility. To simplify systems in this way, leaders can commit to:
Clarifying expectations and decision rights so employees know where they have the autonomy to act.
Creating psychological safety, where individuals feel safe to take measured risks without fear of consequences.
Simplifying processes to remove unnecessary complexity that slows decision-making.
Listening (through surveys, Town Halls, employee forums, etc.) and responding to employee input to ensure concerns and ideas are heard, valued, and acted upon.
Fostering two-way dialogue and building trust through intentional conversations where employees co-create solutions alongside leadership.
Giving teams the freedom to challenge inefficiencies, share knowledge, and design better systems for both mission outcomes (such as efficiency and effectiveness) and individual outcomes (such as professional development and wellness).
By removing systemic barriers and reimagining traditional power dynamics, leaders can enable their employees to thrive, take collective action, and co-create solutions that drive measurable outcomes. To achieve these outcomes, leaders can institute these best practices for employee-driven initiatives:
Host Lunch & Learn Sessions: These types of sessions address barriers to knowledge-sharing and skill development by empowering employees to lead the learning initiatives.
Launch and Act on Culture and Engagement Surveys: Surveys like these break barriers by asking employees for their input and trusting employee-driven committees to analyze and act on critical feedback.
Launch a Wellness Program: A wellness program can elevate employee-driven solutions for mental and emotional health.
Initiatives like these enable leaders to create space for employees to express themselves, innovate, and collaborate. By empowering employees to exercise their agency and providing constructive feedback or acting as thought partners, leaders can unlock creativity, ownership, and leadership at all levels.