Empowering your employees is a great way to improve employee engagement and retain your top talent. Employers and employees both have unrealistic perceptions about what empowerment is and how it's supposed to work in real-time. Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision-making about their job in autonomous, independent, selfdirected ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of your destiny.