A team of my consultants recently completed another wave of leadership development programming up on the North Slope in Alaska, a tough place to work, and a tougher place to implement "employee engagement" programming.

They were struck once again by the same paradox: The more freedom workers have to innovate and create within their area of responsibilitiy, the better they do their assigned tasks. In an operational area like an oil field, full of guidelines and regulations to ensure safety among oil field workers, loosening the supervisorial structure is hard, yet step by step engagement is embedded, and results consistently exceed what executives expected. And these employees willingly increase the energy they dedicate to their craft without promise of additional remuneration (for reasons too extensive to detail here.)

And now, confirmation of these conclusions has come in from a completely different arena: Las Vegas Casinos. A study from Harvard Business School examined the productivity of casino workers who interact with customers in Las Vegas to see whether expanding their ability to create customer-centered solutions would cost the casino money ("break the bank") or generate more business from the customers they handled. The result: Pushing the ability to offer customers incentives down to the front desk/concierge significantly improved per-customer revenue.

The study posed this question:

"What is the proper balance to be struck by a business between encouraging autonomy so that employees can ignore red tape to serve the customer quickly and efficiently, and mitigating the risk that they'll make bad decisions?

Here was the answer:

"If business owners are interested in their customer-facing workers learning and making progressively better decisions over time, they're far better off taking a hands-off approach and granting more freedom for decision-making."

Pretty straightforward conclusion! I think a critical part of this success was that these customer-facing employees were well-training and well-directed in the latitude they were getting, then set free to implement creatively within those guidelines.

I believe that with the mindset and toolsets we have at our disposal, any business will benefit from unleashing the full contribution of all of their employees. It goes back to the “Economics Of Trust,” about which multiple papers have been written. The only way people get smarter is if they are allowed to experiment and the closer you monitor them, the less they experiment. You don’t abdicate supervisorial responsibilities, but do it more productively, creatively. It's all about feedback (the Pursuit of Truth!).To the degree any business can support each employee in understanding their roles and allow them to be creative and innovative in the customer or peer interaction, that business will see full engagement from their workforce. This results in more and better focused energy in every professional interaction. This permanently boosts personal productivity, which this research proves is measured in tangible financial benefits for the organization.