These days, we see the word empowerment much more often than a couple of years ago – and that’s awesome. To function healthily and happily (besides productively) in a society, a person needs to know their value and importance, and that what they do matters. So what brings us here today is exactly this: the importance of making sure everyone you work with knows how important they are, and how valuable. 

So let’s begin with portraying two different scenarios: 

First, let’s imagine you are one of your employees. And you come to the office every day thinking that everyone there believes it’s the same if you are there or if you are not. And you feel the work you do is  expendable, or that just anyone could get it done, so what’s the difference if you are there or not? It’s very likely that you won’t stand this feeling for a long time, and sooner or later you’ll want to leave that place. 

Second, let’s cast you in the role of client. Let’s say you hire a company that has a huge amount of clients and treats all of them the same way, and sometimes even makes you feel like they are doing you a favor. And you are constantly thinking that they don’t care at all whether or not they are hired by you, and you can see that in the work they do, which might even be good – just not special, personalized, or attentive enough. And again, there’s no way you’ll deal with that for too long, you’ll just want to move on and hire someone that makes you feel like they care about having you as a client, and that you matter. 

Both of these are great examples of the terrible outcomes of treating everyone the same and rarely empowering people on what they can bring along. So today we’ll deep dive into some of the reasons why you must keep this in mind and some of the ways to do it too. So let’s jump right in and start with the reasons to care, shall we? 

Lack of empowerment & lack of motivation 

If you feel the life of your colleagues or the person you hired would be the same with or without you there, then what is it going to motivate you to continue being there? Yeah, not much. People need people, so it is super important that you make sure both your employees and your clients know how much you care about them and how much you value what they do, regardless of how little. 

Not being seen & mediocrity 

If no one’s ever either checking up on you or letting you know that what you do is important, then there’s a very high chance that you’ll just do a mediocre job. And I don’t mean this in a bad way, if you have no motivation to do an incredibly awesome job, then it’s very likely that you’ll settle for good enough and have to live a life with no outstanding results. If a client feels like they are not being seen, they’ll slightly start walking away or asking for less and less stuff from you, until they eventually will walk away completely. 

Who do you think you are? 

Why would you think it’s not worth it to make people feel valuable? One of the most wonderful qualities a person can have is the ability to make people around them feel happy and comfortable, whether it’s clients, employees, coworkers, or personal relationships. So being kind would be reason enough to make sure people enjoy working with you, and feel good and lucky about being where they are. 

That said, let’s review some tips and possibilities to make sure the people you work with feel empowered. 

Decision making process 

During the decision-making process, both with your colleagues and clients, it’s super important that you make them feel they deserve to give their opinion and have thoughts on the subject. Even though you know where you’ll eventually end up, it’s still essential to give people the opportunity to express themselves and to make them feel like they have a saying in all of what’s going on. 

Recognition & words of assurance 

Both your employees and your clients need to know that you care about them. And even if it’s not the only thing to do, sometimes just being verbal about that can go a long way. Congratulate your employees on their hard work, tell your clients how much you appreciate them trusting you, show them recognition and that will make them enjoy working with you a lot more.  And of course, this must also be accompanied by actions that correspond; you can’t tell your clients “yeah I appreciate you” and then ghost them for a week. 

Fluid communication 

There’s nothing that employees and clients will value more than knowing that they can come over and talk to you about stuff, and trust that you’ll also be communicative with them. A huge part of empowering people is being honest with them, letting them know what’s going on and how things are going, and being open to listening to what they have to say about it. 

So basically the conclusion here is very simple: to keep your clients and employees happy and wanting to keep on working with you, make sure they know that you care about that happening. It is not the same to work with someone who could care less about you being there or not than to work with someone who’s constantly on top of guaranteeing everyone knows how valuable they are.