Workplace Transparency is a great tool when implemented correctly. Are your employees already able to freely express their opinions and feedback on certain activities without any fear? Read this article to learn why transparency is so important to move forward and making the most of your employees’ strengths and knowledge.
Changing your current office to a transparent workplace will help your employees do their best work, while you see an increase in motivation and performance.
The Importance of a Transparent Workplace
Workplace transparency is at the core of a successful, positive, and performance-driven workplace. It describes an organization that makes an effort to share information freely, not leaving out the good and the bad. With integrity and honesty, employers can avoid a toxic workplace where information is shared behind closed doors. Employees can only speculate about what is actually going on. Transparent workplaces build trust and make employees feel like they are part of something bigger. The employer encourages ideas and feedback to be freely expressed in order to continually develop and value each employee’s strengths. This eliminates the risk of overlooking great minds and ideas that could fuel the company’s performance.
Overall, Transparency encourages collaboration, trust engagement and performance between employees and employers. It strengthens the wellbeing and motivation of your employees.
This is how you can reach a transparent work environment:
5 Ways to Reach the Goal of a Transparent Workplace
Define the Company Intent of Transparency
Define your goal of establishing transparency to be more strategic and understand the why. Clearly communicate to your employees what is expected and how it is being implemented. Build trust by leading as an example.
Implement Regular Stand-Up Meetings
Most of the time, employees don’t know what their colleagues are working on. This can mean that the full potential cannot be realized because there is no collaboration or conversation between employees that can help solve problems. This form of lack of communication leads to loneliness and promotes the feeling that one’s own work is not noticed.
Daily or weekly stand-up meetings can counteract this process. Stand-Up meetings focus on giving each employee a chance to share their work and communicate possible updates. This form of transparency promotes team communication and employee appreciation.
Share the Good & the Bad
We tend – no matter whether in private or professionally – always share only the positive, so as not to create the impression that their own performance is inadequate. No one likes to admit mistakes, but they are all the more crucial for further development and improvement in the future. Therefore, encourage openness about mistakes made and focus on what you have learned from them. Share how you are going to respond and move forward with the project or task for others to learn from it. Do not sugar coat the results, as this can only lead to an unnecessary repetition of mistakes by other employees that do not know about your learning curve.
Break down the walls between departments
Departments are automatically separated by a certain barrier of different tasks, projects, team leadership and spatial separation. However, this can lead to false biases, miscommunication and lack of or poor collaboration as there is no sense of togetherness.
There is no need to tear down the walls between departments, but cross-departmental team exercises can be done. Simple ways to integrate this are joint lunch or coffee breaks, if necessary, initiated by the respective team leaders.
No Taboo topics
The best-known taboo topic is probably the discussion of employee salaries. This taboo has existed for a long time in many countries and companies. Reason? Unknown. Guess? To save costs. The open communication of taboo topics like salary, however, can lead tremendously to a better working atmosphere and prevention of discrimination. This strengthens the feeling of togetherness and promotes the recognition of similar achievements.
These 5 methods lead to a very good foundation on the way to complete transparency within your company and ultimately to more creativity, togetherness, honesty and overall happiness.
This post was written by Novative. They are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Payroll, Time & Attendance floor in the Technology Hall here.
