If knowledge is power, we are at the best time to empower all of our remote collaborators through total organizational transparency. The advantages of doing so go far beyond a good work environment.
All companies want to hire competent, committed, and well-meaning collaborators with whom they can place their trust.
But today, more than ever, employees also want to belong to an organization with nothing to hide. That honors its values and the interests of its staff in every moment. Tap here to run a BMW VIN lookup online.
It is proven that there is a directly proportional relationship between the amount of effort, time, and resources that a company invests in communication, corporate social responsibility and transparency, and the achievement of financial objectives.
However, what is really surprising is that transparency is still one of the weakest points of companies.
Unfortunately, in most work environments, archaic, secretive, and hierarchical notions of what should and should not be shared with employees continue to prevail. While, on the one hand, transparency and absolute disposition are required of them, the company avoids communicating issues and practices that are of vertebral importance for the interests of the collaborators, thus projecting not only mistrust, but also a profound lack of respect and gratitude towards their team.
Transparency marketing: the predecessor of two-way corporate transparency
With the rise of the internet and social networks, companies lost a lot of control over their “classified” information. As a result, no complaints from users, employees and other stakeholders regarding poor service or bad practices were made public much faster.
Some companies, instead of panicking, identified the great opportunity behind this phenomenon and worried about being transparent and having nothing to hide, making the necessary adjustments in their philosophy, organizational culture, values and policies to be able to show internal and externally as they were.
This meant multi-million dollar investments and profound changes, but it had its rewards: transparent companies enjoy a much more positive reputation, build customer loyalty much faster, and generate more sales .
If transparency is so effective as a marketing tool for the consumer public, what makes us think it will not have the same internal benefits as an employee branding tool ?
What does organizational transparency mean?
Today, those organizations classified as “Great place to work” share the virtue of being transparent with their employees, that is, information is not interpreted as something dangerous that has to be restricted, but is seen as a productivity enhancer and sense of belonging .
For example, Buffer is a relatively young millionaire company that bet from the beginning for total transparency. Each collaborator knows how much everyone else earns, the email chains are available to whoever wants to read them and the strategies and direction of the company. The company are shared from the start.
According to their website, they see transparency as “an effective way to work remotely as a team and establish a culture of trust.” Something that in the post-pandemic home office environment is more urgent than ever.
Benefits of two-way transparency in remote work
- Increase responsibility, empower and improve individual self-management
- Increase overall productivity
- Consolidate trust and satisfaction with the company
- Allows areas of opportunity to be identified and resolved faster
- Encourages healthy competition, but also mutually supportive behaviors
- Increases tolerance and understanding of potential errors
- It allows to offer a much more realistic and precise panorama to the candidates in a recruitment process
- Decrease staff turnover
How to enable two-way transparency in remote work?
There are four major requirements to become a 100% transparent remote company and enjoy the benefits it offers:
1.- Horizontality
Transparency and arbitrary and inflexible hierarchies are not compatible. Traditionally it is thought that the work and activities of someone who has a higher position have more right to be “secret”.
The reality is that the most efficient in terms of communication and efficiency is that everything that does not have an explicit reason to be classified, is totally transparent. So, for example, there is no reason why a new junior employee cannot look at the projects the area manager is spending his time on.
Horizontality also means giving and receiving feedback regardless of the role played and the confidence that controversial or sensitive issues can be addressed without risk.
2.- Commitment to constantly improve
Transparency is the result of having nothing to hide, and that can only be achieved based on a genuine commitment to being better and doing things well. It is of no use that everything is transparent if the areas of opportunity are going to be ignored or omitted, or if that is not going to establish an environment of motivation and healthy competition that really allows the team to grow and evolve.
3.- 360 ° communications in real-time
The technical element is perhaps the most complex part of remote bidirectional transparency because it involves creating an “open office” type collaborative environment where everyone can have access to what others are doing, but at the same time without anyone feeling watched. nor is the right to privacy violated with personal matters.
This requires quite sophisticated and customizable software. Generally, companies that want to control remote work turn to Time Trackers, but most do not have an open office approach and instead of increasing two-way transparency, they only encourage micromanagement.
(If you want to know what micromanagement is and how to avoid it, download the free guide at the end of this article)
Unlike most of the available options, Workpuls is a remote worker tracking software that can be configured to create virtual environments with horizontal transparency.
4.- Prevent without suspicion
Obviously, there will always be sensitive information that should not be leaked because it can be misused. Security must continue to be guaranteed even in an environment of two-way transparency. Most of the time, this sensitive information is the exception rather than the rule (for example, bank passwords or access to critical systems), but it still needs to be protected, and also without the employees feeling that they are under suspicion.
Again, this can be achieved with the right technology, which allows us to be transparent with respect to our activities but always hiding data or information that can be disastrous if it is prone to human error.
As you can see, two-way transparency not only helps you obtain better results in your company, it is also becoming a determining factor when attracting talent.
You can enable it in your collaborative remote work 100% with a tool like Workpuls, but you must know how to use it correctly and without falling into micromanagement.
