Triumphant transparency: Cultural shifts for ROI

In this UNLEASH webinar watch Kyle Lagunas, Head of Strategy & Principal Analyst at Aptitude Research speak with Toby Hough, Senior Director of People and Culture for EMEA at HiBob, Lotta Patrickson, Vice President, Global People and Culture at Antler and Felicia Williams VP of People at TravelPerk about the importance of transparency and trust, removing obstacles to a more transparent culture, and the need to create strategies and metrics around this facet of working life.

Why Trust?

Anyone who has worked in a company, big or small, wants to know what’s going on: we spend so much time at work…so we want to be in the know.

Kyle Lagunas, Head of Strategy & Principal Analyst at Aptitude.

Lagunas kickstarted by relaying the importance of trust: it’s the foundation of an effective team. Especially so considering the increasingly global and virtual nature of teams. As such, transparency is critical to ensuring good organizational outcomes, growth, and navigating the constant state of change.

How to build transparency and trust?

As HiBob’s Hough continued, recent stats showcase that to be effective in a role people want to feel like they belong to, and can trust in, a company’s culture. This is not only important to decreasing turnover and delivering productive outcomes but also guarding a business against uncertainty and economic headwinds, such as those experienced by many organizations right now.

However, getting to a place where employees feel the culture is transparent and they can trust in it is easier said than done. Ergo said Hough, you need to get employees involved in building this culture of transparency.

Get them to help build the values and language you use and make that tangible by linking these values to individual and organizational performance, as well as support mechanisms. Critically important is understanding the role leaders play too, and getting them to share even top-level strategy insights with the business at a regular cadence is critical to transparency and trust.

Also important is cultural intelligence training — which can forestall missteps, especially critical in international organizations, which can then breed mistrust — and understanding the impact unconscious bias can have. “[This training] helps avoid barriers to trust…spreads awareness and spreads into the culture…and informs one-to-one interactions,” said Hough.

Indeed, as Hough finished, looking at five key verticals to trust is a good place to start: Evaluating your values, training all leaders, making that leadership visible, getting communication right, and setting the cadence of communication are all critical. And test as you go, he added. The subtext: getting it right the first time is unlikely.

Challenges to trust and transparency

Yet, if getting to a trust-centric organization was so easy, everyone would be there already. However, as a webinar poll suggested, hurdles to building such a culture exist.

As attendees revealed, their major challenges are ensuring alignment between stated values and then subsequent actions, and then ensuring that all business leaders are aligned is difficult. It is not surprising when trying to manage day-to-day complexities alongside strategic culture goals and the need to balance honest communication with employees and not overwhelming them.

As Lagunas said: “We get stuck between the complexities of managing our ultimate [culture] goals and then trying to bring everyone along the way…we [HR] can be evangelists and solution architects.”

Sustaining a culture of transparency

But say that an organization does manage to overcome such impediments, how can people leaders continuously reinforce transparency and trust, especially considering that many organizations are increasingly remote?

For Travelperk’s Williams, it’s about making sure the right champions are evangelizing such a culture, and upholding it, within the business. People leaders are critical here so it’s on HR to ensure they’ve got the supporting principles of management in available training materials. These managers need to know the power of storytelling, they need recourse to supporting materials, they develop development courses, and they understand the power of authentic leadership. “But it’s about making this culture sound like you, as a manager,” she said.

There is also the issue of ensuring that any transparent or trust values become embedded in the real. “Repetition, repetition, repetition is crucial here,” said Antler’s Patrickson. “It’s about making sure this gets embedded at every stage of the employee life cycle…expose new joiners immediately…but integrate this into employee engagement surveys and recognize your people,” she said.

As panelists laid out, recognizing someone who showcases values, letting peers self-recommend for culture champions, pulse surveys, senior leadership visibility, HR practicing the values, updating values when appropriate, and creating a culture of feedback (even of feedbacking to the feedback), and making managers the centerpiece of this will be critical to creating trust and transparency. As will be being honest about how much change is possible.

“But the how behind the values is also important…the story behind the values is almost as important.” Hough reminded webinar attendees. Indeed, transparency about those transparent values and how they come to be is critical.

UNLEASH is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDC) for SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification activities.