What One Thing Will Benefit Your Employee and Client Relationships the Most?

Making your company more transparent is critical to improving employee and client relationships.

With 75 percent of executives believing “consumers demand transparency” it is no wonder that the need to adopt business transparency is important. Developing a transparency in regards to management is ethical and practical. Transparency can play a positive role in maintaining an engaged and motivated work force. Doing all you can to make your management style a more transparent one will improve all of your employee and client relationships more than anything else you can do.

Transparency is often one of the best ways of attracting and retaining top talent. The theory “If I can believe and trust my management, I’ll work harder for them” rings true for employees. According to an American Psychological Association survey in 2014, a full 25 percent of employees don’t trust their employer, and not even half believe their employer is open and upfront with them.

With trust comes loyalty. Employees are more likely to quit their jobs in order to quit their bosses. When an employee likes their boss, they will be more willing to put up with a problem with a co-worker, lower pay, and other problems.

Here are three ways you can do to make your company more transparent:

Commit to Open Communication

Management transparency is said to be the top influencer of employee happiness. The best part of this is that the cost of improving transparency is virtually zero and instead relies on ongoing dialogue between management and staff. A continuous commitment to open communication is all that is required to make your company better.

A more recently conducted survey found that “Every organization should be thinking about how they can be more transparent. It is one of the lowest to no cost initiatives to tackle right away. But of course it requires an ongoing commitment from management to be more transparent to the very people they so carefully brought on board. At the end of the day, to give is to get.”

Transparency Starts with Management

The success of a business begins with the leadership. In order for the employees to be open with management, management must be open with its employees. Having a relationship built on trust with employees will motivate them to be invested in the company’s goals and mission.

Start a Company Blog

One way of dealing with the need to be a more transparent company is by setting up a blog that company employees write. The blog can be a window into the inside happenings of the company. The transparency into the company will be good for customers, potential employees, and current employees. You can keep track of successes, feedback, and current happenings in the company.

What about Nonprofits?

Nonprofit organizations face even more pressure to be transparent, but they fear that doing such will overburden staff, increase administrative costs, and make them more vulnerable to criticism on how funds are being allocated. Here are five easy steps nonprofits can take to increase transparency:

Regularly update your website with the current programs and evaluation information such as strategy, evidence-based evaluation metrics, and the underlying theory of change.
Post your annual report on the website.
Post board and main staff members’ titles, names, and short bios to highlight each person’s contributions and skills.
Post any audited financial statements on the website.
Post your IRS letter of determination on the website.

These steps are fairly simple, considering most of the steps must be taken to have the information available for public inspection. Much of the information also has to be gathered anyway for proper governance and management.

A nonprofit that engages in transparent practices can easily better their organization by engaging the public and attracting outside resources. The more invested the public feels in your organization, the more likely they are to donate funds, volunteer, and positivity promote the company. The best transparency policy to follow will be your own based on the mission and needs, policies, and legal issues of the company.

Conclusion

Discussions must be had by management at your company to determine what information could or should be made transparent. The process of opening up your business may take a year or more, but any progress is a step in the right direction.

See the following articles for more information about improving your company:

Photo: aiche.org