How to build the Work Culture of the Future: Chapter 2 — Openness
Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve shared goals. And today, the most forward-thinking organizations, whatever their missions, are embracing openness as a necessary orientation toward success.
Table of Contents
- What is Openness?
- Drivers of Openness in an Organization
2.1 How to Encourage Risk Taking?
2.2 Decentralized Decision- making
2.3 Open Information Sharing
2.4 Valuing Diversity
2.5 Making People feel Valued
2.6 Role of Transparency
2.7 Informal Communication - Outcomes of Openness
3.1 Organizational Stability and Teamwork
3.2 Increased Productivity and Supported Innovation
3.3 Action Based accountability - Case Study 1: Google’s Approach to Openness in an Organization Culture
- Case Study 2: An Indian IT company’s “Openness” strategy to reduce integrity violation in Workplace
- Conclusion
1. What is Openness?
According to Mid Staffs public enquiry ( 2013) :
Openness is enabling concerns to be raised and disclosed freely without fear, and for questions to be answered.
Proactive communication and inclusive bi-directional dialogue and interactions on things that matter to the physical and psychological well being of the employees. — Supriya A, Director HR, Ecolab Digital Center
We welcome people, perspectives and ideas with an open mind. — Seema Natrajan, Manager — HR , Heptagon Technologies
Where there is freedom to express and create one’s own value. — Mr. Hemang Desai, HR advisor and business success coach ,Triledge Advisory & Coaching for Transformation (TACT)
It seems so obvious that a culture of openness and transparency is a “good thing”. And yet, scandals keep on occurring, in every sector. Employee survey responses show that they do not believe that their good ideas will be listened to, or that there will not be adverse consequences if they speak out.
This makes us question as to what drives openness in an organization.
2. Drivers of Openness in an Organization
Published Research suggests that openness in an organization’s culture is driven by the following factors.
- Encouraging Innovations and risk-taking
- Having Decentralized Decision Making
- Practicing Informal Communication
- Incorporating Transparency
- Have open Information Sharing
- Value diversity rather than uniformity.
- Make People feel valued and supported.
Now, let’s see how these factors can be incorporated within an organization so that openness becomes a norm.
2.1 How to Encourage Risk Taking?
Provide opportunity to come up with creative ideas / ways to do the job. — Sreedevi Somashekar, Senior Lead Talent Acquisition, JRD Systems
Leaders need to take the first step in extending trust to those they lead. Through their words and actions, leaders can send the message that appropriate and thoughtful risk-taking is encouraged and rewarded. When people feel trusted and secure in their contributions to the organization, they don’t waste energy engaging in CYA (cover your “assets”) behavior and are willing to risk failure.
The willingness to take risks is the genesis of creativity and innovation, without which organizations today will die on the vine. Creating a culture of risk-taking will only be possible when mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities.
Viewing Mistakes as Learning Opportunities
Imagine that you’re an average golfer who decides to take lessons to improve your game. After spending some time on the practice range, your instructor takes you on the course for some live action and you attempt a high-risk/high-reward shot. You flub the shot and your instructor goes berserk on you. “How stupid can you be!” he shouts. “What were you thinking? That was one of the worst shots I’ve seen in my life!”
Not exactly the kind of leadership that encourages you to take further risks, is it? Contrast that with a response like “So what do you think went wrong? What will you do differently next time?”
Garry Ridge, CEO of WD-40, characterizes these incidents as “learning moments,” where planning and execution come together, a result is produced, and we incorporate what we learned into our future work.
2.2 Decentralized Decision- making
People will respect you for what you know, but they’ll love you for your vulnerabilities. — Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines
Decentralized decision-making practices ensure that decision rights are as close as possible to the people who deal with customers, competitors, front-line employees, and other stakeholders. By doing so one can avoid the delays associated with information and approvals traveling up and down the management hierarchy. Creating systems for high involvement in change efforts, openly discussing decision-making criteria, giving and receiving feedback, and ensuring organizational policies and procedures and applied fairly and equitably are all valuable strategies to ensure decentralized decision-making.
On an individual basis, it’s important for the leaders to remember that their people want to know the company’s values, beliefs, and what motivates the decisions and actions.
Every group or functional owner is a representative either for policy making or running any initiatives in the organization. When there is an idea generated, before working on the what next, the idea is brainstormed with the team owners who will resonate the pulse from the ground and once the idea is implemented, it goes on a probation for X period of time before freezing. All inputs from the ground during the probation are considered and implemented where ever feasible. — Supriya A, Director — HR, Ecolab Digital Center
2.3 Open Information Sharing
In the absence of information, people will make up their version of the truth. This leads to gossip, rumors which results in people questioning leadership decisions and losing focus on the mission at hand. Leaders who share information about themselves and the organization build trust and credibility with their followers.
When people are entrusted with all the necessary information to make intelligent business decisions, they are compelled to act responsibly and a culture of accountability can be maintained.
2.4 Valuing Diversity
Creating a diverse workforce can contribute to:
- Increased retention and productivity
- Increased responsiveness of an organization to the diverse world of customers
- Better relations with the surrounding community,
- Expanding the creativity of the organization overall
To value diversity, one needs to develop an understanding of what is diversity. It needs to be seen as an area of opportunity. Diversity must be taken into account during recruitments, talent development, mentorship, partnership, communication, etc.
2.5 Making People feel Valued
Treat employees as the most critical internal customers. Do not get your employees do what you would not want a client to do or the client will not agree to do. — Supriya A, Director HR, Ecolab Digital Center
When employees feel valued, they’re more likely to remain loyal to the organization, even if it’s not perfect. Increased job satisfaction can lead to improved performance and reduced turnover. Clearly, employers have an incentive to ensure employees feel valued — but how can they do that? Let’s take a look at some ways.
- Recognition. The simple and obvious first answer to making employees feel valued is to provide them with the recognition they deserve. This can come in many forms, but the important thing is that it happens. It can be one-on-one, in a group setting, in the form of raises or bonuses, etc.
- Solicit employee opinion and utilize it as much as possible. Ask them not only about the work but also about the job itself: what’s good and bad about it and how it can be improved
- Provide work that offers the right level of challenge showing that you trust their capabilities
- Say “thank you” — simple, but effective, and often overlooked. This can be done in a lot of different ways. For example, a simple verbal thank-you from a manager can be meaningful. It can also be meaningful for a leader to publicly thank an entire team for their efforts.
Initiatives like open hour with leadership where employees can reach out to their leadership either in person , text or call for a quick connect in a defined window of time during the day on weekly basis. — Sandeep Kumar, Asst Director ,HRBP EY
2.6 Role of Transparency
Better alignment of the business goals, clearly defining priorities, clear process and metrics for tacking and evaluation and 360 degree team work. — Krishnan, Head HR and Administration
Of all the drivers of openness, transparency tends to serve most of all. Here are ways of incorporating transparency in a corporation:
- Everyone working on a project or initiative should have access to all pertinent materials by default.
- Motivation and training should be programmed such that people willingly disclose their work, invite participation on projects before those projects are complete and/or “final,” and respond positively to request for additional details.
- People affected by decisions should have the provision to access and review the processes and arguments that lead to those decisions.
- People should value both success and failures for the lessons they provide.
- Goals should be public and explicit.
Luncheon sessions, Quarterly webcast series with leadership help leadership communicate same messages across the board and exhibits transparent and openness culture in the organisation. — Sandeep Kumar, Asst Director ,HRBP EY
2.7 Informal Communication
Informal communication at work is any type of communication that doesn’t take place using formal methods or structures in a company. It can be spoken, written or even conveyed through gestures and body language.
The informal communication network that exists in a workplace is often termed “the grapevine”. This is when colleagues chat or gossip about what’s going on in the company.
The grapevine is an unofficial channel of communication. Although it doesn’t have a formal structure, it is still very effective at conveying information. Communications move in all different directions according to which employees know each other well, whether they interact with each other socially or as part of their jobs. It isn’t restricted to following the typical hierarchical flows of information, such as up and down the chain of command.
Due to the interconnected network structure of the grapevine, information flows quickly between individuals and can rapidly spread across an organization.
To optimize this channel of communication, focus on the following.
- Set boundaries of Informal communication
- Encourage sending of friendly emails to colleagues
- Provide a platform for the establishment of informal relations amongst the employees based on their interests and hobbies.
Applying these practices fosters an environment of trust and openness that allows your team to not only survive but thrive, in today’s fast-paced world.
3. Outcomes of Openness
3.1 Organizational Stability and Teamwork:
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. Building camaraderie and feeling of “we’re all in this together” is especially important when an organization is going through a large change.
3.2 Increased Productivity and Supported Innovation:
When information and expertise are accessible, employees can take initiative to solve their problems rather than spending time to figure out who has the information they need to do their job. It also supports people coming up with creative solutions
3.3 Action Based accountability:
A company named Cybozu in Japan recently completed a review of all managers and people in leadership roles.
After employees submitted their anonymous feedback, the conversation continued with managers openly posting their response about areas they’d like to improve in along with actionable steps.
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.
4. Case Study: Google’s approach to Openness in organizational culture.
Openness cultural characteristic refers to the sharing of information among Google’s employees. The company’s objective in promoting openness is to encourage the dissemination of valuable knowledge that can support further innovation.
Example: The corporate culture motivates individual employees to interact with each other at various times of their typical workday, as a way of improving the knowledge they use in their jobs.
In relation, Google’s operations management strategy supports this cultural trait through appropriate workplace layouts that facilitate such interaction.
5. CASE STUDY 2: An Indian IT company’s “Openness” strategy to reduce integrity violation in Workplace
Recently, when I went for an HR conference which is usually a farce but you end up collecting one or two nuggets of useful information. One such nugget was from the HR head of a big Indian IT company that was at the receiving end of a hostile take over. She said that when she went through the policies and procedures of the company taken over, she found one of the policies very interesting. Here is what she told about it
Company X has adopted the Code of Conduct, Integrity & Ethics Policy that lays down principles and standards that govern every business action of the employee.
The company adopted the Code of Conduct for prevention of Insider Trading in the securities of the company. They also adopted the Code of Fair Practices & Disclosure to regulate the fair disclosure of unpublished price sensitive information.
To comply with this, the company created a portal with all the policies uploaded on it. The portal allows the employees to register any complaints and access redressal for the same. Once the issue is resolved, the case is shared internally with all employees. This helps the company in two ways.
One, it creates awareness about the type of problems that arise in the firm and the ways in which it is dealt with. This brings in transparency in the company. Second, it protects the company from facing the same problems again.
The effect of the policy was remarkable. After the open and transparent sharing of issues internally, the rate of integrity violation went down by a significant number (~3 fold).
We note that a culture of openness can help not only in the growth of a company in terms of innovation and productivity but also in bringing down the rate of integrity violations.
Conclusion
Openness is one of the four key factors to build the future of work culture. Developing this culture involves inculcating certain factors in the day to day functioning of the organization. The small effort put in to inculcate those factors result in big outcomes like better teamwork, higher productivity, and efficiency. In a nutshell, to be future ready, it is essential to adopt openness in the workplace.
That concludes this chapter on “Openness”. The next chapter is gonna be on “Flexibility”.
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References:
- https://www.employmentstudies.co.uk/system/files/resources/files/mp96.pdf
- http://panmore.com/google-organizational-culture-characteristics-analysis
- https://blog.kintone.com/business-with-heart/create-transparency-openness-company-organization
- https://opensource.com/open-organization/resources/open-org-definition
- https://leaderchat.org/2017/01/26/4-ways-leaders-can-build-a-culture-of-trust-openness/
- https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/01437720810888580
- https://hbr.org/2017/12/when-to-decentralize-decision-making-and-when-not-to
- https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/12/27/how-to-make-employees-feel-valued/
