How to Bring Transparency In a Non-Transparent Work Culture

Have you ever experienced following situations in your company:

• Searching for information or trying to find a responsible person usually takes longer than 10 minutes.
• You are waiting for an email reply for a long time to be able to continue working on your task.
• You often search for the necessary documents in email attachments.
• You feel irritated with obscure instructions and unclear project objectives.
• You are very displeased with the quality of your colleagues work on their part of the project.
• It’s really difficult to find a responsible person for a particular task.

Then most likely your organization have problems with work process and the only feasible option to improve it is to build a culture of transparency. Transparency is obviously a buzzword. It sounds great when it rolls off your tongue in board meetings. But it’s much harder to actually do transparency in the day-to-day grind of business, especially online business. Here are three practical ways to increase transparency across organization:

1. Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

OKR is a technique for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. Its main goal is to connect company, team and personal objectives to measurable results, making people move together in right direction.

What does an OKR really do?

OKR creates focus and prioritization. It align team effort and makes sure everybody is working toward the same goal. Objectives are goals. They tell you where to go. Each objective has a few Key Results. They indicates how you will get there.

From the mission and vision, you can derive your Objectives. Together they tell you Where. Todos are the key things you do to achieve your Key Results. Together they tell you How.

Your vision is a long term view. From the mission and vision, you derive your annual objectives. Annual objectives split into a quaternary objectives.

OKR has four simple rules:

• Set them annually and quarterly (a year and a quarter are timeframes in which you really can achieve somethings)
• Don’t have too many objectives and key results (5 objectives are fair enough)
• Make them challenging (companies who set challenging targets achieve more)
• A Key Result should be a number (numbers enable objective evaluation and create a learning process)

How OKR can help increase transparency?

Big part of OKRs is making sure that each individual knows what’s expected of them at work. Let’s imagine that we set a goal — to boost awareness and visibility of our product in Europe. In such case we will have following OKRs:

For a company

Objective: Increase brand awareness.

• KR 1: Start a referral program by May 1
• KR 2: Extend coverage in social networks for French and Italian languages

For a marketing department

Objective: Enhance the involvement in the social networks by 35%.

• KR 1: Determine the three most popular social site in France and Italy and develop a strategy for customer attraction by May 1.
• KR 2: Responding to comments on Facebook for 3 hours.
• KR 3: Increase the number of Facebook subscribers by 20%.

For a marketing manager

Objective: Increase the number of interactions in social networks 25%.

• KR 1: Join 5 industry groups in LinkedIn with at least 2,500 participants and leave comments on 10 of the most popular discussions in each group.
• KR 2: Get 1500 subscribers in Facebook, publishing 12 articles and 1 promotion each week.

You see that the OKRs are linked to each other — from the big company picture to the priorities of the department and the participation of each specialist.

Typically, each level has no more than 5 goals and 4 key results. OKR should be measurable and always publicly available. Everyone in the company should be able to see the goals and objectives of everyone — from the CEO to the regular specialist. It also assumes that the employee should set yourself an assessment of 0 (not even close) to 1 (all met or exceeded) for each KR. The normal outcome in the 0.6–0.7. If you constantly score > 0.7, your OKRs is not challenging enough and you should set more ambitious targets for the next quarter.

2. Open Communications

Well, in case of communication— transparency is an open, honest and direct communication with co-workers. It’s not about some new “hack” or “technique.” It’s about being a real person, a real leader, and a real company. We like people who are transparent, so it makes sense that we like companies who are transparent, too. Transparent communications include clear information structure and lack of secrets:

• Clear structure means that all information is structured and publicly available within the company. Search for information is easy (e.g. direct search or using a filters) and smooth (e.g. information blocks have appropriate tags).
• Every team member could use it without additional permissions.

3. Smart Task Management

You also need to set a common “rules of the game” for the whole company. It’s a special principles of regulating interaction in teams. Principles are quite versatile, so it can used for any team, regardless of their preferred system:

• All tasks should be submitted in task management system. If there is no task in task management system — it simply does not exist.
• Each task should have Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). This inevitably increases importance both for task reporter and responsible person. It also stimulates communication — due to the fact that DRI knows who to ask for details.
• Task is not statement, it’s action. Feel the difference between “Annual report 2016” and “Create an annual report”? Second one asks you to do something. When you track your tasks — you see a number of actions which required.
• Task should have clear and complete description. Simply because it saves a lot of time for DRI on requirement clarification.
• Deadlines. “Due date” should be mandatory for each task. This point has two benefits — it stimulate responsibility and helps to reflect task blockers and bottlenecks— because discussion about deliverables begins immediately after task has been set.
• Attachments. All materials which required for the task completion should be attached to it. Do not use file hosting or links to the emails.
• All discussions on the task should be in the task itself. If two members discussed the details of the project in a private conversation and decide to change a specification without notifying the other, this action will lead to many negative consequences. Because it necessarily lead to unpleasant discoveries for others — refinements, alterations, meetings — all this eventually will increase the project cost.

Conclusion

Pretty simple rules. But in practice, they are not ubiquitously followed even after transition to a project management system. At the same time, if you ignore them — you increase risk of project failure. Try to take them into account (but do not forget to notify your employees) and track the results after a month or two. And you’ll be surprised to see that the transparency of your work processes will increase. Transparency doesn’t just make good ethical sense; it makes good business sense, too. It produces trust.