Transparency in the Workplace: What Are the Benefits and How to Achieve It

In today's world, when employees quickly change jobs and customers replace you with your competitor in a beat, one thing that sets apart successful companies is loyalty. If you have loyal employees, you will have better chances of achieving long-term success. 

Many companies are striving to achieve employee loyalty, and there’s one principle that correlates with happy and satisfied long term employees – transparency. The younger generations expect a certain level of transparency from the company that they work for. 

However, almost all employees are eager to work for companies that show a certain level of transparency. Straightforward communication, clear expectations about what they need to do, and a distinct vision are the key aspects of company transparency.

In today’s post, we will be discussing the benefits of transparency, as well as how you can create a more transparent environment within your own organization.

Benefits of a Transparent Workplace

A Better Understanding of Company Goals

When you encourage employees to share more information with you and their coworkers at every level in your company, you help create a unique understanding of the overall company goals. By being more transparent, it is more likely that your employees will be on board with the company's aspirations and goals which could lead to them cutting fewer corners to do their tasks and do their part in achieving company goals. More transparency leads to more realistic goals that are more likely to be achieved.

More Streamlined Business Operations

In the business world, surprises can have unfortunate consequences. By being more transparent and sharing more information within the company, you will be able to build stronger and more stable operations. Think of it like this, if a problem occurs in your company, no matter how simple and solvable it is, you do not want to nurture an environment where employees are not comfortable voicing their concerns. This may turn a small problem into a huge profit-killing disaster.

Fostering Better Ideas

Two heads (or however many people work for your company) are better than one. By being honest with your employees about any problems you have in your company, they can help you find more creative solutions quicker. 

By involving everyone in the problem-solving process, more people could come up with ideas about how to solve certain problems. More transparency encourages an innovative and more thoughtful atmosphere in which all employees can come up with out-of-the-box ideas.

Happier Employees

As previously mentioned, employees highly cherish transparency in the workplace. Some studies even say that company transparency is the number one factor that determines the happiness of employees. If a company wants to use transparency to build more employee engagement and happiness, they need to update their entire staff about any current events and long-term plans regularly.

If you share your vision with all your employees, you will help make everyone feel they are more connected to the work they do. They will also feel like a more vital part of your company. Also, transparency encourages more trust, which is a foundation for every healthy relationship.

Better Relationships with Customers

If you want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers you need to rethink how you communicate with the public. Companies that are open about their environmental impact and the way their supply chain operates are in general perceived as more successful than their more secretive competitors. 

More Profitability

While it may sound that more transparent companies are imperfect, customers prefer honesty and are more likely to purchase from companies that are open and honest with them. Many customers rank transparency as the biggest factor when it comes to being loyal to a brand.

How to Create More Transparency at Work

Create an Honest Platform

Being able to give and receive honest feedback is one of the pillars of transparency. Open communication fosters a healthy work environment, it creates trust among employees and pushes more innovation in the company. 

To create a positive and truthful platform in a company, you first need to communicate all the important information with everyone at the company while making sure not to withhold anything of importance from employees, as that could harm your projects and the trust among the team. Applying this platform to your company could lead to more engaged employees that are coming up with creative solutions for common problems in the company.

You can start cultivating this platform by introducing standups at your company. Standups should be the one place where everyone can be informed about any work that the company is doing as well as timely updates about the company. Standups help create more transparent communication among all employees.

Be More Open

One of the ways to create a truly transparent company is to be more open. Some of the ways to be more open include: 

• Making all company credo and knowledge available to all employees;

• Open-door strategy – It encourages employees to stop by their superiors whenever they have questions, suggestions, or problems. An open-door policy helps foster a more collaborative high-performing and mutually respectful environment between employees and management;

• Open floor plans – By rearranging your offices to be more open, you encourage more engagement and collaboration among employees. You could also consider adding whiteboards as a way to encourage employees to collaborate more;
  
  
• All-hands meetings – Also known as town hall meetings, are regular company-wide meetings where all employees meet with the leadership of the company to discuss all matters. They can be a great way to foster wider-company transparency by sharing business updates, celebrating milestones, driving alignment with the company goals, and giving everyone a chance to speak.

Share Company Results

By sharing your wins and losses with everyone, you can create more transparency in your company. Be honest with everyone about all the good and bad that have happened in the company and do not sugar coat it. This will help your company learn from your failures.

How to Achieve a More Transparent Workplace With the Help of a Worker Tracking App

One of the ways to achieve greater transparency in your company is to use a worker tracking app like Insightful. With Insightful, you can get valuable insights into how your employees work while at the same time Insightful can help your employees stay focused on their work and be more productive. 

For a worker tracking app to foster more transparency in your company, you need to be clear and specific in identifying what and why is monitored as well as how employee monitoring will work. Insightful gives you data that you can use to measure the performance of your employees. 

By creating an open tracking company-wide policy that allows everyone to see the data the app collects, you will be able to build more trust with your employees when they know exactly what all of their colleagues are doing. Our worker tracking app is designed in a way so that you can manage the level of monitoring that you and your employees are most comfortable with, either on a company, team, or individual basis.

‍

At the same time, Insightful also has less intrusive tracking methods like not tracking the activity in certain apps and websites or at certain times, allowing for more privacy for your employees, which makes our work from home employee monitoring software very useful in helping you achieve more transparency in your organization.

Conclusion

Achieving transparency in your company can help you gain many new benefits. Transparency can help improve the overall trust and honesty in your company, it can also help you solve problems and stop potential disasters before they even happen. Transparency can also help with employee retention in your company. 

All of these benefits of a more transparent workplace could lead to the significant growth of your company. So, what is stopping you from trying to be more transparent in your company?