Following the shift towards remote work during the pandemic, employee autonomy has become somewhat of a buzzword. Despite that, the concept is much more important than it seems on the surface. It can have lots of positive effects on professionals, helping them perform their best.

In this guide, we’ll explore these effects, along with why employee autonomy is important for businesses. We’ll also cover a few of the challenges of the concept and how you can take advantage of it with time-tracking software.

What is employee autonomy—and what is it not?

Employee autonomy simply refers to professionals having more control over their work. This typically includes how they work and when they work. It involves only slight variations to not impede the progress of teams. For example, if one employee chooses to work at night, they wouldn’t be able to collaborate with their coworkers very effectively.

But, many leaders believe that autonomy involves far more than what we discussed. Employee autonomy does not mean that your staff can work without guidance. It does not mean that your team members can go against your company’s values and make decisions you’d never approve of. Ensuring moderation of autonomy is key to taking advantage of its benefits.

The positive effects of employee autonomy

Let’s now explore why you should care about employee autonomy at your business, starting with an obvious one—time savings.

Save management time

Increased autonomy will let your staff complete more tasks on their own. They won’t have to get as many approvals, especially for smaller and less significant assignments. As a result, not only will your tasks be done sooner but your managers, leaders, and senior staff will save time. 

While this is an obvious benefit, many managers are opposed to workplace autonomy because of it—according to Sciencedaily’s article on autonomy in the workplace. Avoiding this pitfall can let your management team spend extra time on work that matters more for your company’s growth.

Enhance professional engagement

As your team members work whenever they choose, they’ll have a greater sense of control over their tasks. As a result, they’ll complete their assignments with more motivation. This will result in a higher professional engagement rate, which has two major benefits of its own: enhanced productivity and talent retention.

Enhanced productivity

Increased employee autonomy will help your staff be more productive. This mainly results from the enhanced engagement of the concept, but, autonomy over when people work plays a major role too. Most people are only productive within certain periods of the day. Enabling your team to work during these peak productivity hours will let them perform their best. At the same time, it will also help boost their work-life balance.

Better creativity and innovation

If you let your staff make more decisions themselves, they might come up with unique solutions to problems. As innovation is a key driver of growth and success, increasing your staff’s autonomy can be quite beneficial—especially in the long run.

More professional growth opportunities

Employee autonomy can help professionals take on tasks that are new to them. This is a vital part of career growth—which can help your business grow in several ways. More knowledgeable people will create higher-quality products. In turn, your firm can stand out from its competitors with a set of unique offerings.

Improved employee retention

Giving employees more autonomy will increase their job satisfaction. People who like their jobs will be committed to it, putting in lots of effort to perform well. They’ll also be less likely to search for different career opportunities, enhancing your talent retention rates. This can be especially important for smaller businesses with tighter HR budgets.

The challenges of employee autonomy

While there are lots of benefits to higher levels of autonomy, they also have a few drawbacks. Let’s explore these now—starting with the balance between trust and control.

Balancing trust and control

In any situation where you delegate a task to others, you give up a degree of control over it. Deciding who to delegate an assignment to involves one key factor: trust. After all, if you know someone cannot complete a task, you won’t trust them with it.

Balancing the trust you put in your team and the degree of control you want to have over their work is important, but challenging. Getting this wrong can result in you or your managers checking the work of your team too frequently. On the flip side, you could also trust coworkers too much, ending up with subpar work.

The main way to overcome this challenge is to familiarize yourself with your team’s capabilities. For example, you could track staff performance for a while and analyze this data. An excellent way of doing this is with time tracking software.

Managing different work styles

Managing work styles is important, especially for diverse and larger teams. This mainly involves collaborating effectively to minimize the impact of any differences in how team members work.

Time tracking apps can be perfect for enhancing collaboration. They can help arrange collaborative sessions like meetings or make it easier to collaborate on projects and tasks. Many high-quality trackers, like WebWork, even offer dedicated communication tools—further streamlining the collaboration process for your firm.

How a time tracker can help enhance employee autonomy

Let’s now explore how time trackers can assist you in enhancing employee autonomy. We’ll start with the solution to the first challenge we covered: ensuring trust.

Ensuring trust

The data that a time tracker can collect will make it easier for you to trust your staff with delegation. By analyzing productivity and performance over a period, you can measure how well each employee can perform in their roles. After this, provide them with increased autonomy in proportion to their abilities. Make sure to also periodically review your team’s skills to make any necessary changes down the road.

Setting objectives

Setting clear objectives, both for the short-term and long-term future, is vital for several reasons. It will help your staff get a better idea of what decisions are right for your business. As a result, you’ll need to review their work less frequently. You can do this with a time tracker with project and task management features. These will let you write down what you want to accomplish and how. Moreover, defining goals is important in avoiding work siloing, which can have a sizable impact on your team in some cases.

Implementing flexible work schedules

As mentioned before, when to work is a key part of the employee autonomy professionals are looking for across the globe. Fortunately, doing this with time tracking is quite easy. By tracking how much your team works, you can remove any start and finish time requirements. Besides increased autonomy, flexible working hours have many benefits of their own, which could make them a worthwhile investment.

Closing thoughts

Employee autonomy can have a measurable impact on any business. It can help your team perform their best by enhancing their workplace engagement and providing better job satisfaction. In turn, employees will perform better, helping your company grow. While autonomy has its challenges, the right approach can help you take advantage of its benefits—while avoiding the downsides.