12 Strategies to Embrace and Foster Transparency at Work

Transparency is above all clarity, openness and honesty, in all situations in life and work (the “easy” and “difficult” ones).

Transparency at work is about promoting behaviors conducive to clear, honest and trustworthy conversations among the people in the organization (especially between employees and leaders) to openly and honestly discuss about goals, feedback, performance and more.

Transparency has two fundamental elements: clear communication and explanation of the rationale behind corporate decision-making processes.

Transparency is an active mechanism to counteract the negative effects of office politics, gossips, secrecy, backchannels and favoritism. Transparency is about respectful and compassionate straight-forwardness.

Transparency is not about blurting out everything in the heat of the moment and calling it “being transparent”. Transparency comes from a genuine place of care and compassion for the people, and commitment to the success of the organization. It requires candor.

An organization that embraces and actively promotes transparency at work creates an encouraging environment for employees to discuss about their goals, successes and failures, needs, without fear of punishment or retaliation. Transparency is necessary to create a psychologically safe organization.

Lack of transparency generally leads to disengagement and lack of trust in the decisions made by the organization’s leadership. Employees often understand that some decisions are not easily made, but they want to understand the “why”. In addition, transparency doesn’t require that everything, all the time, has to be public to everyone. There are confidential matters in any organization. However, sharing the rationale of why something would be confidential also fosters transparency.

Transparency is powerful to:

- Increase employee engagement

- Foster and reinforce an environment of psychological safety

- Transfers decision-making authority and freedom across all corporate ranks

Transparency is not just the right thing to do to create strong, meaningful and successful connections, relationships and communities at work, but it is also a cherished virtue that increases band reputation and talent experience.

Here you have 12 strategies to build transparency in the workplace:

Strategy 1: Corporate policy

Embrace transparency as a company or team policy by describing what it is and when/how it comes into effect, and actively practicing as a leader. This means that transparency has to be properly written in the corporate policy and communicated to everyone. Transparency has to be communicated by the most senior leaders in the organization. This way it is clearly understood that it is a virtue championed by upper management and not just "another HR thing".

Strategy 2: Accountability

Create accountability around transparency by keeping leaders in the organization to the highest standards of transparency. This means including key indicators of transparency in their performance reviews, rewarding and celebrating transparency, and actively (and transparently) addressing violations to the code of transparency in the organization.

Strategy 3: Information

Silos are a trap for transparency. Break down silos that prevent information to flow naturally and transparently between teams. Make sure that you are removing all obstacles that prevent people from doing what people naturally do: communicate. Transparency depends on information flowing mostly freely across teams and within the teams. Silos generally have a "head" through which all information must flow, which adds to the risks of lack of transparency. Remove communication and information silos as much as possible, even if the silos themselves remain.

Strategy 4: Access

Grant people access to important information relevant to their work and their decision-making. Avoid withholding valuable information. Employees need to have access to information in order to make timely, relevant and valuable decisions. Make sure that they have access to the information they require. Withholding relevant information from them is already a threat to transparency.

Strategy 5: The "WHY"

Explain the rationale (why) behind decisions for people to understand why a choice was made. People appreciate the "why", even if the decision isn't their choice. Transparency requires actively and intentionally explaining how and why certain decisions are made, especially when those decisions affect people directly.

Strategy 6: Involvement

Get people involved in the decision-making processes of the organization. This significantly increases engagement, buy-in and understanding, and, of course, transparency.

Strategy 7: Freedom and authority

Give people freedom and authority to make valuable decisions to get their work done. Transparency allows for others to know how a decision is made and who made it. In an organization that embraces, fosters, practices and celebrates transparency, guardrails don't mean what they mean for the rest: a way to keep people corralled. To get people excited about their work they must have freedom and authority to get work done in the ways that make more sense for them. With transparency there is more freedom as well as more accountability.

Strategy 8: Clear and direct

Remove all backchannels that distort information flow. This is to avoid one thing being said and another being done. People discover these backchannels, which leads to not trusting final decisions. One of the things employees hate the most is when the organization doesn't walk the talk. This happens often when transparency is embraced as important, but not practice in daily operations.

Strategy 9: Communication

Make formal and informal communication valuable. This doesn't mean opening up backchannels but encouraging people to communicate with each other in formal or informal settings. This may sound paradoxical when compared to strategy 8. Backchannels (as in strategy 8) are ways to try to achieve a different outcome than the one transparently committed by the team. Whereas formal and informal communication means giving people the opportunity to collaborate and cooperate with each other by exchanging valuable information that can help them with their work. This approach would allow for communications to flow freely not just in formal meetings, but even in random conversations in a hallway (physical or "virtual" hallway) simply because there is nothing to hide and no threat to anyone when that information is flowing freely. That's what happens when there is transparency.

Strategy 10: Learn

Share highlights from successes, failures and lessons learned. This fosters both transparency and safety, which in turn begets more of it when the next opportunity comes up. The reality is this: there are no secrets in any organization, even when everyone tries to keep it... secret. People will eventually find out, and it is much worse that they find out via backchannels because then the information has been already distorted. This includes failures. It's better to embrace the highlights from failures and successes so that everyone can learn from them. This way everyone celebrates when there is something to celebrate, and everyone learns when there is something to learn without fear of retaliation or punishment for failures.

Strategy 11: Understand

Promote behaviors that lead to the deepest understanding of a given situation. When employees understand they are more keen to participate in and trust the process.

Strategy 12: Role Model

Role model transparency behaviors, especially at the leadership level. Employees want to know that "transparency" is not just a nice-to-have, but the way the organization operates