The corporate culture within an organization can directly impact business success. Without an engaged workforce, the bottom line suffers. The struggle becomes, “how do we create and nurture a corporate culture that engages and motivates our workforce?”
The answer might lie in transparency.
Enabling employees to know the current status and direction of the organization directly empowers them through an understanding of how their daily work helps the company achieve goals.
A corporate culture of transparency is one where the workforce is given access to important and meaningful information. It is also an environment where trust in senior leadership is established and an open, honest two-way dialogue exists.
Here are 4 ways to create a corporate culture of transparency within your organization:
- Connect the workforce with leadership. Whether it’s through a weekly, company-wide meeting or an employee suggestion box, connect your employees directly to senior leadership. By opening the passageway for two-way dialogue, regardless of channel, you are setting the stage to build trust through transparency and communication.
- Real-time sharing of important information. There are few things worse than employees finding out big company news from an outside source before an announcement is made internally. Make every effort to maintain transparent and real-time communication with your employees – it shows you value them as members of the organization.
- Give them the ability to stay connected 24/7. Leverage new resources and technologies, like an intranet or enterprise social network, to drive collaboration and enable information sharing. By giving everyone a platform to connect, you’re getting people talking to each other (regardless of geography or job function) and opening the doors for efficiency and new ideas.
- Encourage employee input and feedback. Promote an open line of communication with all your employees. But keep in mind that it’s one thing to ask for feedback and ideas – it’s another to embrace it with an open mind. Make sure that when you’re collecting input from your workforce, you are listening in a way to elicit true understanding and consideration.
Tell us in the comments section below: How is your organization creating a corporate culture of transparency?
Interesting read. Openness and ease of access to information in an organization plays a vital role for the success of the organization. If everyone communicates openly and have access to the information they needed then productivity is not interrupted and hence tasks are accomplished at the end of the day. Here is another article about cultural transparency in intranets that I find insightful as well: http://www.simpplr.com/blog/2016/making-cultural-transparency-happen/. Give it a peek!