Who Cares About Transparency?

Workplaces with Great Cultures, that’s who! Transparency has become a key to attracting and retaining top employees. The Great Recession brought out the worst in corporate leadership. Hidden agendas and greed of bankers and high-powered CEOs left many employees and customers in dire financial straits. Not to mention, their faith in corporate leadership was forever changed.  Without transparency, there is no trust in leadership.

What Is Transparency?

The Business Dictionary defines transparency as a “lack of hidden agendas or conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making” and an “essential condition for a free and open exchange whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants.” 

Companies Who Care About Transparency Increase Trust

Transparency works for Google, Intel, and Salesforce and they’re all leaders in their fields. They’ve found that transparency is one of the biggest drivers of creating trust with their employees and customers. “Always be 100 percent transparent in business, especially with the risks of the product or service you are selling. All you have in business is your reputation, which you take with you from one employer or start up to another.”

Transparency is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement with your employees. “Your employees and talented job seekers want to work for a transparent company. Plain and simple. In this increasingly competitive market, that’s becoming the standard.”

Case Study: The Dark Side of Transparency

When done ethically, transparency increases trust and engagement. However, some companies attempt to be transparent by using UX as a means of monitoring employees online in the guise of transparency. Make no mistake, this is not transparency, it’s unethical behavior. It’s typically an attempt to gather information that the current leader is lacking to do their job. If this were in the spirit of transparency, the monitoring would be communicated to all parties involved and go both ways so the employees were also aware of the managers’ activities. This is a clear violation of employees’ privacy.  

Transparency vs Privacy

According to the Harvard Business Review,  “being observed distorted behavior instead of improving it.” Some corporations have found success in avoiding politicking by creating transparency within small teams. Transparency can easily slide into “surveillance” of competitive teams especially when a new political leader is promoted within an organization. Rather than asking the predecessor’s leaders for updates, they simply monitor them online & use the information to their advantage. In a highly political environment, new leaders don’t want to admit they don’t have the necessary skills or background to do their job. This is where transparency is abused by leadership to serve their own needs.

Full Disclosure On Why You Are Being Observed is Critical

If the intention is to learn from best practices and share them with the broader team, it’s beneficial. If it’s punitive because a particular leader in the organization doesn’t know that part of the business and is trying to learn it covertly, then the intention is clearly unethical and a reflection on the culture and leadership style that’s rewarded within that company.

People who know they’re being observed may “bait” their activity to see the repercussions. It becomes a juvenile game of cat and mouse. The higher level course of action would be to directly address the parties involved and have a professional discussion.

Develop Trustworthy Leaders

Take a close look at leaders in your organization. Is there an opportunity to better align their behavior with your cultural values and mission? The Bob Pike Group has helped 95% of Fortune 100 companies with measurable training and performance solutions. There are several options to choose from:

1. Public Workshops – Experience for yourself how our instructor-led, participant-centered approach helps people learn twice as much in half the time.
2. Onsite –The Bob Pike Group will come to your company and coach your team of managers. It’s a great way to build teamwork and set clear expectations for your company’s mission and values.
3. Design Consulting – The Bob Pike Group will work with you to customize an Onsite Workshop for your team. This includes high level strategy and facilitation across functional areas to ensure corporate training objectives are defined and carried through. Team members are assessed afterwards to ensure information is retained and applied.

Learn how to write effective training objectives with this “Free Guide: 5 Tips for Writing Effective Objectives.”