Smart and Effective Transparency

As per the first consideration, the intent is to establish systemic honesty rails. The challenge is to raise the benchmark bar for maintaining honesty from all perspectives - horizontally and vertically. The topic of transparency is sometimes referred to as "radical transparency". The radical aspect of this consideration is that there should only be one answer about being ready for systemic honesty - “Yes”. 

The concept of transparency is associated with valid questions relating to performance anxiety and possibly over-sharing. These are easy to resolve if you stick to the tenets outlined below. Psychological safety is a key element when addressing anxiety - choose the right solution for aggregating real-time grassroots experiences.

Operational HR processes are necessary in any organisation. The approach of Neelix Employee Engagement is different - we solve a specific need for a Live Pulse and context aware information flow in a complementary way.  

If transparency is a nurturing rain for a winning culture, then it must be a gentle and kind experience—hail never helps.

Transparent information flow is not about increasing and prolonging debates. Build up transparency at own pace and sprinkle it with humour.

The secret sauce is making ongoing experience reflections measurable and context aware. Accumulated data points will form a picture that speaks a thousand words. Data will effectively have its own non-emotional voice at the negotiating table. 

Safe transparency introduces a change where people drastically cut time spent on “proving the point”. In other words, people talk less at each other. Instead, there is a fundamental shift towards conversing and figuring out how differences in perspectives can be bridged, and how two individually good ideas can give birth to a better third one.

“What is in it for me?” is the key question that all employees will ask. The promise of systemic changes will still leave some sitting on the fence. The buy-in is achieved by being much more determinant about making the maturity curve a real journey and within reasonable timeframes (reasonable being before the talent retention boiling point).

Buy-in critical mass is achieved when you flip the reasons for experiences sharing. Safe transparency is a forward-looking step towards an “exceptional team”. It is not a performance management trick. Better performance is the result of trust created by transparency. This change in feedback’s raison d'être is the one that can galvanise disparate teams (and sometimes characters within a given team) around the motto “we win together, and we fail together”.

The effect: 

Transparency is 0% about policing, and 100% about making a maturity curve journey into a practical and achievable outcome. Read more here.

The effect: 

Psychological safety is promoted and people are given time to adjust. Transparency cannot be mandated, but the whirlpool of transparency posts created by few key individuals in organisation will bring onboard others on their own terms.

The effect: 

Safe transparency is about measurable and context specific signalling. There is less need for verbage because people are not asked to over justify the post. 

In combination with anonymity controls, encourage people to use humour to express emotional payload of the signal.

Incorporate humour into into the social contract across the whole of the organisation

The effect: 

Greater transparency of the breadth and depth of issues and wins increases trust. Research has proven that real trust result in improvements akin to:

• 74% less stress
• 50% higher productivity
• 40% less burnout

The effect: 

Team leads join forces to work across the organisation more effectively.

Transparency prevents issues that are normally dealt via legacy survey-intervention patterns, or at performance management stage. This is achieved by bridging differences in perspectives in a timely manner. 

Leaders' time investment changes away from being a “boss that resolves issues”, to being an impartial art critic of the picture drawn by radical transparency. 

The effect of this systemic change is the removal of a psychological element whereby people expect someone else to resolve problems. People do not have a choice of working around the collaboration. This experience ignites cross-teams character building and fuels mutual accountability across all functions.

The effect: 

Authentic transparency gives an additional tool to leaders. If the right solution is employed, non-emotional data points provide a very visual and context aware picture of the landscape and correlations. This picture is based on direct grassroots feedback and is formed “for free” in real-time, e.g. without periodic surveys. 

The power of messaging is multiplied when such a picture is referenced in direct communication with employees, partners and clients. The reason for the power is the unfiltered and direct nature of data points - e.g. people can trust that state of affairs has not mutated in the way it normally happens through status reports. At the same time, leaders themselves can have confidence that well-meaning team leads have not over-emphasised or under-represented the true state of information and collaboration flow. To complete the circle, grassroots learn that their feedback actually matters, and that this is achieved without additional policing. Reduced need for survey-intervention methods and openness of data points counter-balance watercooler culture and self-fulfilling differences in perspectives.

The effect of  transparency is that you can have a complex org structure but a simple cultural and political environment.

Senior leaders improve the power of messaging and capability to change hearts and minds.

The effect: 

If the right solution is employed, safe radical transparency is very easy to propagate to any project, even if it involves a joint venture across multiple partners and client’s own teams.

The effect is the same - short-circuited politics.