76 ways to foster a culture of transparency at your company (and the only 3 that really matter)

In recent years, many companies, from small to large, have been looking for ways to make their workplaces more transparent and?open.

Businesses want to empower employees to experiment, make decisions, and self-direct their efforts. Openness facilitates trust and ensures that people have access to the information they need to succeed.

Many companies who’ve embraced the culture of transparency are seeing remarkable benefits,?including:

• Increased employee engagement and?productivity
• Higher levels of autonomy in decision-making
• Faster information flow and more creativity
• More ethical behaviour (less acting in the?“grey”)
• Stronger employer brand

But while some businesses have succeeded in practicing transparency, many stumble in the attempts to do so, and even more are fearful of opening up.

And I don’t blame them:?Vulnerability is?hard.

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never?weakness.” — Brené Brown in Daring?Greatly

In this article, let's?explore the three fundamental ideas?at the heart of building a culture of transparency at your company and?then look at 76 different ways?you can use to put these ideas into?action today!

And, of course, you don’t have to do all these things at once. Start with what feels comfortable. Then do a bit more. Then try something you think might not work, just to see what?happens.

One step at a time, and you’ll reach your destination before you know?it!

1. Declare your intentions

Maybe you’ve already done this, maybe not. But the first step to entrenching the culture of transparency (or any other value, for that matter) is deciding that it matters to your organization and then sharing your intentions with everyone at the?company.

Start by sitting down?(or standing up; I don’t judge!)?with your leadership team and having an honest conversation about what “transparency” means to everyone in the?room.

Here are some sample questions that might?help:

• When you hear the word “transparency,” what comes to?mind?
• If we do this, what will we, as a company, get out of?it?
• What are your?hesitations?
• Which organizations inspire you?
• When we look a year ahead from today, why might this initiative not have worked? What will have gone?wrong?
• What is the cost of not becoming more open?
• How radically transparent do we want to be? On the scale from “not telling the employees where the office is” to “cc’ing our competitors on every email,” where should we?land?

As Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler discuss in?Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High ,?your goal is to develop a “pool of shared meaning” among the leaders?at your?organization:

“Each of us enters a conversation with our own opinions, feeling, theories, and experiences about the topic. These make up our personal pool of meaning. When two or more people enter a crucial conversation, we build a pool of shared meaning—the more we add of each person’s meaning, the more information is available to everyone involved and the better the decisions?made.”

Once you have agreed on a shared definition, codify it in a single document written in plain?English.

If it feels right, you can add these ideas to the list of your core values or operating principles. But you don’t have to force it if you still feel uncertain about the whole thing. You can always do it?later.

Finally (at least for this part), declare your intentions and share the work you’ve already done with your employees.?A “town hall / all-hands” meeting and an unscripted Q&A session are highly?encouraged.

2. Build trust with your employees

As discussed, practicing transparency requires a certain degree of vulnerability and courage from everyone?involved.

All of this gets easier when your employees trust you and know that the trust is?mutual.

Depending on your starting point on this journey to openness, your team might feel skeptical, if not cynical, when you share your intentions with them. That’s?ok.

The only thing you can do as a leader is set an example and consistently make a point of trusting that your employees are smart people with good intentions, and if you are open with them, they will be open with you. They will do the right thing with the trust you place in?them.

If you treat your people as intelligent, thoughtful adults, they will behave as?such.

So stop worrying. Start trusting. Amazing things will?happen.

3. Tell it like it?is

This fundamental principle of fostering a culture of openness is super simple and yet, so rarely?followed:

Tell it like it?is.

Don’t over-promise. Don’t hide issues. Don’t tell people everything is peachy when you know things are?not.

If you’re manufacturing a version of reality that is distorted and untrue, you’re not practicing transparency. You’re doing something else?entirely.

And hey, I get it! The idea of not telling the employees about the company’s challenges often comes from the best of intentions, i.e. from wanting to protect them from the anxiety and stress that business leaders often?experience.

Here’s what Ben Horowitz, the author of?The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers ,?has to say on this?issue:

“As the highest-ranking person in the company, I thought that I would be best able to handle bad news. Interestingly, the opposite was actually true: nobody took bad news harder than me. Engineers easily brushed off things that kept me awake all night. After all, I was the founding CEO. I was the one married to the company. If things went horribly wrong, they could walk away, but I could not. As a consequence, the employees handled losses much better than?me.

“Even more stupidly, I thought that it was my job and my job only to worry about the company’s problems. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have realized that it didn’t make sense for me to be the only one to worry about, for example, the product not being quite right?— because I wasn’t writing the code that would fix?it.

“A much better idea would be to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but would be personally excited and motivated to do so. Another example: if we lost a big prospect, the whole organization needed to understand why so that we could together fix the things that were broken in our products, marketing, and sales process. If I insisted on keeping the burdens of setbacks to myself, there was no way to jump start that?process.”

So tell it like it is, and then trust that your employees will reciprocate your honesty with a commitment to solving the company's biggest challenges.

76 More Ways to Foster a Culture of Transparency

Now that we’ve identified the three most important things you can do to make your company more open and transparent, here are 76 more ideas and actions for you to?try.

Note that these are listed in no particular order and vary in the degrees of both “radical-ness” and “seriousness.”?So, caveat emptor and all?that ;).

1. Get a team communication tool, like Slack or Microsoft Teams. These tend to distribute information among employees much more evenly than?email.
2. Default to having your Teams channels public rather than?private.
3. Assign a person to be a “Transparency Champion” for a few months. Ask them to look for things that should be open but aren’t, and give them the authority to question the status quo. Rotate these champions to consistently get fresh?ideas.
4. Have the CEO host weekly or monthly “office?hours.”
5. Have the executives host a quarterly “fireside chat” about what’s going on in their?departments.
6. Create company and team performance scorecards and make them available to everyone on demand.
7. Enable employees to answer engagement surveys non-anonymously.
8. Share engagement survey results with the team, including free-form answers. No editing, no redacting of manager names.
9. Use a formula to calculate people’s compensation packages and stock options. Share the formula.
10. Share your private company’s performance data with the public.
11. Start an “insider” blog where you talk about what’s going on in your company.
12. Start an “insider” TikTok account where you show the day-to-day happenings at your company. No?editing!
13. Invite random employees to an executive meeting to sit?in.
14. Share executive meeting notes with the entire?team.
15. Record some or all meetings and share the recording (audio & video) (like Bridgewater Capital).?(Personally, I think this is crazy, but who am I to?judge?)
16. Share as many documents as possible in your Wiki/Intranet with the team. Set people’s permissions to allow comments and?suggestions.
17. Host regular all-hands / town hall meetings where you talk about the company’s accomplishments, goals,?and?challenges.
18. Host an AMA (ask me anything) with the?CEO.
19. Show your financial model and cash flow?statements.
20. Host a company retreat or simply hang out with the team more outside of?work.
21. Have regular 1:1s with your direct reports. Give them time and permission to ask difficult questions; answer them and tell it like it?is.
22. Give employees timely and frequent constructive feedback. It’s surprising how many managers hold back feedback to avoid difficult conversations with their team?members.
23. Do a presentation on the company’s long-term vision and?plans.
24. When interviewing people for jobs, get them to meet the team before you extend an offer. Both parties will appreciate?it.
25. Have a page on your website where your talk about what it’s like to work at your company. If you get Marketing’s help with this, ask them to chill with the?hyperbole.
26. When you see something happening behind closed doors, ask yourself:?“Is there a good reason why we don’t share this?”?If the answer is?“No,”?share it. (Remember:?“We’ve always done it this way”?isn't a good?reason.)
27. Find a way to tie individual performance to the company’s overall performance. When the link is unclear, employees can become?disengaged.
28. Explain how you see the team growing over the next year and what growth opportunities will be available to employees along the?way.
29. Implement an open office layout, or at least dedicate certain areas to unobstructed collaboration.
30. If you’re building software, open source parts of?it.
31. If you’re in the business of giving advice, give a lot of it away for?free.
32. Rethink how you view information: it’s not a tool to gain power by controlling access to it, but a way to empower everyone to make good decisions by sharing?access.
33. Give people access to the raw?data.
34. Publish salary ranges in the job postings.
35. When an employee leaves or is let go, let others know and explain the reasoning (within reason, of course!). Otherwise, expect rumours and speculations to?ensue.
36. Explain the decision-making process behind each big?decision.
37. If Transparency and Openness is a core value for your business, let go of the people who value the?opposite.
38. Get glass walls for your meeting?rooms.
39. Default calendar visibility setting to "Public."
40. When having meetings, keep the doors open. People likely won’t eavesdrop, but open doors are a sign that you’re not trying to hide?anything.
41. Make every email internally searchable (like?Stripe).
42. Create cross-functional project?teams.
43. Institute an "exchange" program where employees can join a different department for three months to try on a different role.
44. Practice defaulting to openness: instead of asking,?“Is there a good reason to share this?”?ask,?“Is there a good reason not?to?”
45. Get new employees to shadow people on other teams. This helps them understand how the proverbial sausage is made and what’s going on in the company from day one.
46. Write quick documentation for anything worth documenting. Especially that thing you said you would document later but didn’t.?You know the?one!
47. Eliminate all hidden fees when dealing with?customers. (like Rise)
48. Make Transparency one of your quarterly objectives.
49. If you’re a small business, have the CEO grab coffee at least once a year with each employee and with any new team members when they?start.
50. Enable employees to give 360° feedback non-anonymously.
51. Make hiring decisions as a group. (like?Google)
52. Orchestrate opportunities for different teams to collaborate and mingle, especially the ones that usually don’t get to interact?much.
53. Make it clear that transparency applies to?everyone, including the?CEO.
54. Invite your customers to hang out at the office.
55. Invite your customers to give a presentation to your team on how what you’re making has impacted their?business.
56. If Transparency/Openness is essential to your company, declare it one of your core?values.
57. Publicize everyone’s professional development plans. This enables employees to learn together. You might also notice more experienced people volunteering to help the?others.
58. Make your pricing model easy to grasp and make it available to your customers and?prospects.
59. When providing feedback to employees, focus on what they did, not who they are. This helps cultivate a “growth mindset” and makes feedback less?scary.
60. Make your Marketing team’s content editorial calendar publicly?available.
61. Take your 1:1s offsite. Go for coffee. Grab lunch. When we connect as humans, we trust each other?more.
62. Don’t punish people who speak their minds unless they act like?jerks.
63. Have each team do a daily standup/huddle, either in-person or?online.
64. Don’t take disagreements “offline.” It’s okay when leadership doesn’t see eye-to-eye, and it’s important to embrace and model healthy conflict?resolution.
65. Coach employees who are more conflict-averse to speak up more.
66. Encourage everyday language instead of jargon when communicating with the whole company. It can be isolating if employees don’t understand something like?“Our CAC ratio is bad because our EMEA-based mSDRs received fewer MQLs than expected this FQ”?and don’t know what it means. (FYI, that means the Marketing team is in?trouble.)
67. Create a glossary of commonly used terms and acronyms so that employees can quickly get acquainted with the language of your?organization.
68. Host your own “screw-up night,” where people are invited to share their biggest screw-ups and what they learned from?them.
69. When interviewing candidates, ask them to share a professional failure and how they grew from?it.
70. Do post-mortems on major initiatives and share the top three learnings with the whole?company.
71. Create an “#ideas” channel in Slack, where anyone in the company can contribute ideas about?anything.
72. If you’re going through layoffs, create a micro-site listing people affected, their accomplishments, and ways to get in touch. Then share this page with local companies who might want to hire your departing?teammates.
73. Compile and share a list of all the software tools you use at your?company.
74. Start trading on the public markets.?(hey, it’s just another way! no?pressure!)
75. Share where each dollar of revenue is?going (i.e., the business's cost structure).
76. When you don’t know something, say,?“I don’t?know.”

Your Turn!

Phew! That was a?lot.

But did I miss anything? Have you tried some other fun or effective tactics are your workplace? Share them in the comments section?below!