4 Smart Wins To Promote Transparency in a Non-Transparent Culture
From open working culture to great collaboration, ProofHub is as transparent as a company should be. We recognize transparency as one of our core values as we believe in building a company culture that attracts and retains top talent. It becomes difficult to retain top talent when the work culture becomes toxic. And transparency is important for positive workplace culture.
Believe it or not, the cool millennial's are talking about workplace transparency. For example, having more transparency about who is doing what, hiring standards, what are the big results, promotion decisions, and salary bands are all a matter of concern.
Here’s a thing about transparency…
Transparency and Certainty
According to a study, it is found that workplace transparency is the most significant factor for employee happiness, and those leaders who take care of transparency are seen as more trustworthy and more effective. If employees feel out of the loop, they are less motivated to perform.
The answer here is to create certainty by keeping employees in the loop. Leaders should share information with all the employees and make sure to include every employee who needs to be invited to every meeting and make a point of connecting the why to the what.
Transparency and Creativity
A 2017 study published in The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies found that “transparent leadership” boosts employee creativity by instilling a sense of psychological safety. A survey data from 51 teams and 199 employees in a large IT company located in China showed that both psychological safety and the ability to focus attention developed a positive relationship between leaders’ transparent behaviour and employee creativity.
Transparency and Engagement
Harvard Business Review 2013 employee engagement survey revealed that 70% of them are most engaged when they have continually updated the company strategy. And they expect an authentic environment where they can comfortably speak their mind (good or bad).
At times, it becomes tough for a manager to promote transparency in non-transparent work culture. So here I can help you with some ways that have helped me throughout to develop a transparent culture and can be of great help to you as well. Let’s get started.
Simple Ways to Being Transparent
- Use Tools That Support Transparency
How many hours do you waste looking for a document in email or to edit different versions of a document? Transparency is related to accessing information. Everyone in the company needs to know where to find the right information at the right place to quickly solve problems. Project transparency is important to make the right project decisions and improved project performance. With tools like ProofHub, it provides more transparency and encourages the team to be more accountable towards work.
ProofHub’s Gantt chart also helps teams to know each other’s responsibilities in a project, details of each team member’s tasks and milestones, and share visibility over workload. This kind of transparency boosts honest and humility within the team.
Share project information with the teams. Start using ProofHub.
2. Break Down Silos
At work, organizational silos prevent resources and information from being shared among teams. And that’s the crux of transparency. Silos is damaging when each team focuses on its core duties and functions to the exclusion of others. While individual managers or departments take ownership of resources competitively without collaborating.
Making transparency a priority can rearrange the office in a way that promotes expression. Doing a daily standup is great, but making sure knowledge is available will create a truly transparent company culture. No need to (physically) tear down the walls but start building meaningful connections with various teams.
3. Establish Open Communication Channels
Employees want to feel free to share their opinions and suggestions and get into authentic discussions to remain engaged. Modern technologies like Slack is certainly a great tool to interact with each other and peer-to-peer communication.
But now there are many Slack alternatives in the race to render the needs of team collaboration. Choose the best communication channels to build a transparent culture where employees feel comfortable speaking up their mind. And when you communicate and collaborate through open channels, you’ll have less messy email threads and few meetings.
Streamline. Connect. Collaborate. Sign up now on ProofHub.
4. Frank Feedback
There is no better feeling than being acknowledged for things you do right. Millennials (especially) want to feel that they’re making a difference and contributing to a deeper level. “Pranav, you deserve A++ for your performance today in the meeting. You had some powerful points and everything you presented was organized in a great way”. Isn’t this feedback great? Employees need feedback like this. If transparency is important for you, give feedback — both positive and negative.
How Transparency Can Help Your Team?
- High-level of trust in a company
- Continuous flow of ideas
- #PowerOfWe — Forces a team to work together smartly
TL;DR
Transparency isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it. At the workplace, it breeds long-term success and involves the practice of sharing information. A lack of transparency in the workplace creates distrust. Well, you cannot bring it overnight. So let’s start slow. Let every individual feel like they’re part of something bigger, let’s promote transparency.
How do you promote transparency with project teams? Tell us in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this…
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- Getting An A++ In Work With Kanban Boards
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