ACTIONS: Improving transparent communication across your organisation

Leaders are transparent about career opportunities and how they tie promotions and pay to performance and legitimate qualification.

What immediate actions you can implement:

• Build into your recruitment processes strategies to attract, engage and retain employees that display the attributes of transparency in everything they do.
• Encourage open and transparent communication with your employees.
• Insist on proactive use of social media by leaders. Social media allows leaders to narrate their own organisation’s news giving them influence over the perception of the brand’s “story.”

What longer term actions you can implement:

• Create an online forum for employees to ask any question of the leadership.

Scenario:

At Percolate, a marketing technology company that advocates building transparency and full-scale engagement into office culture, "talking still works."  Percolate's weekly meetings include every team member judging their previous week’s performance and setting goals for the current one – sharing these insights with the whole team lets co-workers know how they can help each other, and it also means each member learns from the others’ experiences.

Percolate similarly prioritizes communication with its customers, using “human language” in all of its documents and “slowing down” when it counts. Noah Brier, CEO of Percolate, says “we also stress straight communication with our employees, we want every employee to understand our values and what we stand for. We do this by knowing, living and breathing the essence of the company mission by teaching our values to everyone who joins the firm and most importantly by giving employees tools to ask any question they want!"