Constructing empowerment: People, processes, participation and profit

The business environment of construction organisations has borne witness to significant change over the last 50 years. Resultantly, construction management has had to respond to increasing levels of client expectation; globalisation of the construction economy; cut-throat competition; and tight margins (to cite but four issues). To this can be added the (well documented) ‘inherent’ obstacles of operating in the sector, including separation of design and construction; fragmented production methods; adversarial relationships; and an aversion to innovate and uptake I.T. Furthermore, the problems of poor and unstructured training, multitiered management systems, and poor communication, provide less than optimal conditions for achieving high quality products in good time and to budget. One approach to addressing these issues is through the concept of employee empowerment, which brings with it ‘ownership’ of processes, removal of non-value-adding activities, continuous learning, and effective production methods throughout the entire (effectively empowered) organisation. This paper presents an overview of the empowerment concept in the context of construction management, highlighting the hurdles, an implementation process, and achievable benefits.