Company culture can be defined as a set of shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize an organization. But, we’ve all worked at or know of organizations where transparency around operations, decisions, and information is an exception – not a built-in expectation.

It’s important to note that how your leadership communicates information sets the tone for the rest of your organization, which has a very real impact on your culture.

The relationship between transparent communication and employee happiness might not be all that obvious, but the idea is that employees feel a stronger sense of engagement and loyalty when they feel their relationship with their teammates, managers, and leaders is one built on trust and respect. 

And, employee happiness leads to higher productivity and ultimately, higher profitability for the organization. 

So how can you create a culture of transparency and what does it mean to have a culture of transparency and openness? 

1. Making information more accessible to everyone in the organization. While some enterprise information is highly sensitive and needs to be held back for security reasons, most day-to-day information and decision-making processes can easily be made more open and available. 
2. Organizational stability and solid teamwork. People and information are an enterprise’s greatest assets. Transparency helps to build interpersonal trust between employees, regardless of position, especially when there are clear systems in place to communicate. When people are enabled to ask questions in open and honest ways, it nurtures a mutual understanding and encourages more people to share and collaborate with each other. When all employees share the same reality via transparent communication, a change initiative is much more likely to be successful. 
3. Increased productivity and supported innovation. When information and expertise are accessible, employees can take initiative to solve their own problems rather than spending time to figure out who has the information they need to do their job. It also supports people to come up with more creative solutions. Exposing organizational silos opens people up to new ideas and diverse ways of thinking across departments. Tapping into the wealth of knowledge and resources across an organization instead of just one team creates a deeper, more connected pool of ideas for new strategies and better collaboration.
4. Action-based accountability. Putting the facts and feedback on the table, even when it’s uncomfortable, closes the perception gap between leadership and employees and makes our companies a better, more enjoyable place to work at.
5. Utilize tools and processes that support your culture. At Chameleon, we use Slack religiously and have internal scrum meetings every day for about 10-15 minutes so that we can all align together and be aware of each other’s projects and progress on work. Information technology, particularly cloud-computing platforms, makes it easier than ever before to build a culture of transparency across an organization, even when your teams are distributed or remote. We also use our own product, Chameleon BI’s reporting solution to track employee performance and various KPIs that help us advance our business. Request a demo with us by emailing [email protected] to find out more. 

There are lots of ways to build transparency and openness in your organization; make a commitment to it today!