Avoiding Transparency Debt

The other day, I was playing around with our new company intranet, ZG Skylight, which launched in early August to rave reviews from across the company. It’s a fantastic solution on its own, but it is perhaps even more impressive relative to what it replaces – an archaic platform called the zWiki that was at one point in time very innovative, just like the flip phone. Major props to our employee communications team and everyone who supported their efforts for bringing us into 2017.

ZG Skylight has lots of great features, but its most important function is scaling transparency in our business. As companies grow, it’s important to find ways to help people feel connected to each other and close to the action. You often read about tech debt – running fast-growing businesses on archaic systems – but there’s also transparency debt: neglecting the sightlines that extend from the C-level to the most junior employees.

When you’re a single office of 25 people, everyone interacts on a daily basis and knows what teammates are up to. You have opportunities to chat in the kitchen and in the hallway between meetings, and you overhear conversations happening in the open. But when that group of 25 swells to 3,000 across nine offices, things change. If you don’t find a way to keep that “25 feeling” of transparency and camaraderie, people lose their connection to the mission and the business.

Thankfully, technology can help us hang on to that 25 feeling – especially when used by leadership. Slack has become as second nature to me as Twitter, a platform I embraced early as a social CEO. I’ve made it a habit to share my daily routine with employees, including what office I’m in, what meetings I’m headed to and highlights of any interesting conversations I’ve had both internally and externally.

Slack scales the hallway exchanges to thousands of people; everyone can be part of what I’m doing and react to whatever I’m posting. I even have my own Slack channel, “spencertalk,” which has about 1,300 members (I don’t have all 3,000 employees yet as it’s a voluntary channel… but I’m working on it).

When leaders use channels like Twitter, Facebook, Slack or Skylight, employees feel like they’re part of the action. The effect is similar to following an acquaintance on Instagram: Even if you see them a month later, you feel caught up on what they’ve been doing and can pick up where their updates left off.

Though I encourage all leaders to share and engage with employees through these channels, I also caution a few things.

• If being social doesn’t come naturally, don’t fake it. You’ll loathe sharing and probably won’t be able to make a long-term habit of it.
• Be authentic. Employees – especially today – know when something is a statement written by your communications or legal team. Though this is necessary sometimes, try to drive daily sharing straight from you.
• Assume everything you share with employees will become external. Most people usually have good intentions and don’t mean to leak confidential information, but excitement or concern inevitably trumps judgment once in a while.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to Skylight proved that everyone was hungry to feel more connected to the business and their colleagues. Just as we constantly consider upgrades to our tech stack, we should also pay attention to our transparency stack – the solutions that enable us to share and engage with each other across the organization. Both are business-critical.