Ultimate Guide to Objective and Key results – OKR Meaning and Examples
Do you dread setting goals for your organization as you don’t see useful […]
Long gone are the days when transparency was feared by organizations and was deemed to be quite idealistic. Now transparency in the workplace is one of the most substantial factors for establishing a successful organization. Transparency comes into play the moment your organization hires people and influences long-term relationships as it fosters a culture laid on open communication, trust, and honesty. So, what exactly is transparency? Why is it important? How do you establish it in your organization? Well, let’s find out!
Transparency refers to an honest and two-way openness between the employees and the management of the organization. So, a transparent organization is one that functions in a manner that develops openness between the managers and the employees. Focusing on transparency can be the difference maker between a languishing workforce and an innovative, engaged workforce. The absence of transparency in the organization can result in making the employees feel undervalued and apprehensive about the future of their employment and doubtful of the decisions taken by the management. On the contrary, when transparency is augmented in the work culture, employees tend to become more determined and engaged with the vision and mission of the organization. Not just these, there are plenty more benefits of adding transparency to the work culture.
Benefits of workplace transparency
1. Improved employee engagement
Transparency works to set the stage for employee satisfaction and recognition – the two essential ingredients for employee engagement. A transparent organization is one that recognizes the contribution, progress, and achievement of its employees. A report by Havard Business Review revealed that about 70% of the employees feel that they are most engaged when their organizations provide consistent updates about the organizational strategy and decisions (https://hbr.org/resources/pdfs/comm/achievers/hbr_achievers_report_sep13.pdf). So, if you are aiming to improve employee engagement and trust, making your workplace more transparent is one of the fastest and most credible ways to do so. Consider facilitating your teams with digital tools such as okr software and agile collaboration tools as they are known to enhance employee engagement to a great extent.
2. Strengthens innovation
The difference between successful organizations and the rest is how an organization can tackle problems beforehand and come up with new ideas to disrupt the market in a positive manner. A transparent leader should always aim at determining the strengths of every employee for leveraging them together to tackle bigger concerns. For an organization, the best innovations and solutions come from understanding what makes your employees tick and leveraging their strengths. As your organizations grow and rely on your employees to make better decisions, they need to have all the essential details. When you want your people to make the same decisions as you, it is crucial that you give them the same information that you have.
Also Read: Employee engagement trends of 2022
3. Better communication
As your employees engage more and more with your organization after you develop transparent work culture, open communications start to become more natural. As employees notice you and your management being open and communicative, they also feel empowered to share their innovative views, processes to improve the performance, and feedback during the performance reviews. Organizations tend to thrive when their employees trust that they can safely bring forward their feedback and ideas. Better communication ensures that the employees share all the essential details, collaborate to meet deadlines, and maintain the level of work the management and clients expect. Developing a transparent work culture and enhancing communication can help your organization is gaining a significant competitive advantage.
4. Increases productivity
Employees that work in a culture that has no transparency usually feel that as their employers are not straightforward, they do not have a clear idea about the organizational vision. This hampers their performance as they don’t have all the right information to do their job successfully and effectively. Such an environment creates a lack of trust and a huge drop-off in the level of the productivity levels of the employees. This is why you and your management have to be completely transparent about the values, vision, and mission of the organization. When the employees have a clear understanding of all of this, they will work with more clarity, thereby boosting their productivity levels.
How to embrace transparency in the workplace?
1. Prevent silos
The first and the most important way to foster workplace transparency is to break down silos and facilitate open communication. Make sure that knowledge and information are easily available to all the departments of the business. This will work to lay the foundation of transparent work culture. When you and your management prioritize an open-door approach and have events such as town hall meetings, you create an organization that is built on a transparent culture. This prevents silos, bureaucracy, hierarchies, and politics in the working space. Organizations use tools such as OKR program and agile collaboration tools to ensure that their organization works with utmost transparency. Okr software is a highly effective way to prevent silos and establish a transparent work culture in your organization.
2. Invite feedback
Promoting a culture where your employees feel free to give and take feedback is highly crucial to adding transparency to the workplace. This feedback can be related to the business ideas, projects, or anything that concerns them in your organization. It’s a great way to make your employees aware of the fact that their opinions are valuable, thereby adding transparency to the work culture. Nowadays the market is flooded with numerous okr software that provides the feature of 360-degree feedback and creates surveys easily. It’s a great way to ensure that your employees can do it all from one platform and don’t have to hop around from one platform to another.
3. Convey the ups and downs
One of the most key components of maintaining a transparent work culture is to keep your organization aware of both the positive and negative business updates. Organizations do share positive accomplishments and progressive actions with their workforce. But when it comes to the situations such as the challenges faced or the goals that were missed, employees aren’t kept in the loop. Keeping the employees updated with the highs and lows of the organization will never hamper your work culture. It would rather establish a sense of unity and push your employees to come together for the better future of the organization.
As elaborated above, transparency in the workplace is a decisive tool that can pave the way to many new and tremendous benefits for the organization. So, what are you waiting for? Take the step towards establishing a transparent work culture by contacting us right away!
