Aly Pinder and I are starting a new series of blogs where we look to recap some of the key service stories of the week. It'll be like a curated list of service stories for the week. On some occasions we might focus on just one story, presentation, or TED Talk.
This week, we're presenting a TEDx Talk that we greatly enjoyed. It comes from Scott Geller who is an Alumni distinguished professor at Virginia Tech and the director of the Center of Applied Behavior Systems at the Department of Psychology. A lot of Professor Geller's work is actually tied to safety, a topic near and dear to us, but here he focuses on the area of workforce empowerment and engagement. Take a few minutes to listen in:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxpKhIbr0E[/embed]
Our Take Away on Empowerment
Workforce empowerment is a major area of focus for service organizations and service business leaders. Yet, empowerment at the organization level is too often focused on 'getting it done'. True empowerment at the employee level occurs when there is a level of self-motivation to do a certain thing or set of things without worrying about who is watching. In driving self-motivation, Professor Geller's 4 Cs are a good framework:
- The perception of Competence
- The understanding of Consequence
- The existence of Choice
- The sense of Community
Other empowerment guidelines often focus on the first three, but Professor Geller makes a good case for the value of community in driving empowerment. "We need a sense of community and have got to move from independence to inter-dependence."
We hope you enjoyed this installment of our weekly recaps. If interested in some of our recent work around workforce safety, please feel free to listen in on a recent webcast we hosted around safety culture, featuring TSC members Ledcor and Trane. Till next week.