Want empowered employees? Stop making work feel so hard
Summary: Even in the UK’s best workplaces, employees describe waiting on approvals and unclear priorities. Research from 4,000 reviews suggests process friction is the cause. These three system and habit shifts can ease it.
Businesses have spent years trying to empower employees. They’ve flattened structures, invested in AI, embraced agile ways of working and encouraged people to take ownership.
Yet many employees are still waiting…
For approvals. Decisions. Clarity.
Even in top-rated cultures, employees describe feeling stuck: seeking decisions, unsure what comes next, or unclear who can help make progress.
Despite huge advances in tools and systems, there’s one capability that continues to hold organisations back: the ability to truly enable people and teams to make good decisions and move work forward.
Work feels heavy and complex
At Make It Human, we analysed more than 4,000 employee reviews from Glassdoor’s Top 20 UK workplaces. We mapped reviews to our Growth Culture framework to answer one key question: what really shapes today’s best workplace cultures?
The good news is employees consistently describe caring, supportive workplaces where colleagues help one another, managers encourage development and learning opportunities are plentiful.
But it also uncovered a growing friction making work feel heavier than it needs to.
As work becomes more interconnected across teams, involving AI tools, changing priorities and increasing expectations, the challenge is no longer simply what work needs doing. It’s how work gets done.
Employees described new priorities arriving faster than clarity. Decision making flowing upwards. Managers becoming bottlenecks while capable people wait, wondering what happened to their request or idea.
The wider research tells a similar story. Microsoft described an “infinite workday”, where constant meetings, emails, messages and AI-generated work leave little time to think.
Gallup continues to report workplace stress above pre-pandemic levels, while recent research found AI can contribute to stress when it takes decision making and perceived autonomy away.
Even in top-rated cultures, employees describe feeling stuck: seeking decisions, unsure what comes next, or unclear who can help make progress
Making progress or stuck in a loop?
Most HR leaders will recognise the pattern.
A capable employee spots an issue and proposes a solution. The idea is shared with a manager, then another stakeholder, and another. More comments arrive. A meeting is scheduled. By the time approval comes through, the customer has moved on, or the team has already found a workaround.
Nobody intended to slow things down.
But collectively, the organisation did.
Our research suggests employees value clarity, trust and ownership more than another wellbeing initiative or workplace perk. People want to know what’s expected of them, to feel confident to act, and believe they’ll be supported when they do.
Instead, many describe days stuck in a loop of confusion, reviews, approvals, and endless meetings.
This cycle is eroding the three conditions humans need to thrive: autonomy to shape what happens next; meaningful connection with others and a shared purpose; and the opportunity to make progress, learn and grow.
Ironically, the very qualities organisations are trying to encourage through innovation, collaboration and AI transformation.
Bringing out the best in people and technology
The first thing to acknowledge is that this isn’t usually created through a lack of care.
The challenge is that care can become stretched when complexity increases.
“Let’s get through this first.”
“We’ll fix the process afterwards.”
Complexity is no longer the exception; it has become the operating environment.
The organisations pulling ahead aren’t investing in more initiatives. They’re focused on removing friction and facilitating ways of working to bring out the best in people in the everyday.
This means:
- Intentionally creating clarity, psychological safety and trust
- Making decisions easier
- Clarifying priorities more frequently
- Giving teams permission to solve problems within clear guardrails instead of waiting for senior approval.
In practice, they’re making work feel lighter, clearer and more human, to fuel collaboration, adaptability and innovation.
Our research suggests employees value clarity, trust and ownership more than another wellbeing initiative or workplace perk
Three steps to start redesigning how work gets done
Effective change requires intentional focus on both the systems we shape and the everyday habits we adopt.
1. When work expands, don’t let clarity disappear
System shift: Replace annual priorities with regular priority resets. When new work arrives, ask what will stop, pause or move.
Everyday habit: Start key meetings by asking, “What decision are we trying to make today?”. Five minutes clarifying the outcome often saves 30 minutes discussion.
2. Stop dangling empowerment as a carrot. Design for it instead
System shift: Redesign decision ownership. Define which repeated decisions belong where, which require consultation and which genuinely need senior approval.
Everyday habit: Before answering a question, simply ask, “What would you do?” It shifts ownership back to the team encouraging coaching rather than dependency.
3. Match good intentions with everyday experiences
System shift: Measure culture through repeated experiences, not just annual engagement scores. Look for recurring friction such as approval bottlenecks, unclear priorities or meeting overload, and remove them.
Everyday habit: End weekly meetings with one question: “What’s one thing making work harder than it needs to be?”. Then commit to removing one barrier each week.
Growth cultures create the edge
There’s no doubt, AI will continue to reshape how work gets done, but technology alone won’t create more agile organisations.
That depends on the cultures we build around it.
The organisations that flourish won’t simply be those with the smartest technology. They’ll intentionally create the conditions for human growth: giving people clarity, confidence to act, and trust they’ll be supported.
Empowered teams don’t emerge because people are told to take ownership.
They’re nurtured by designing environments where taking ownership becomes the easiest and most rewarding thing to do.
Your actionable insights
- Create clarity before adding more work. When priorities change, make it equally clear what will stop, pause or shift. Ownership starts with knowing what matters most.
- Design decision ownership, don’t just encourage it. Define who can make which decisions and give teams clear guardrails. Empowerment grows when people have both the authority and confidence to act.
- Remove friction, one habit at a time. Regularly ask your teams, “What’s making work harder than it needs to be?”. Then commit to removing one unnecessary barrier each week.
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