Building trust and transparency in the workplace plays an important role in your business. Employees want to feel safe that not only is their job secure but that they have someone to go to in the event they need some help, either professionally or personally.
Things such as diversity, inclusion, and communication, as well as many other factors, all play a role in making an organisation transparent. But leadership is also a huge component. After all, people follow the examples leaders set, and this makes it your responsibility to be as transparent and trustworthy as possible. Here’s how to do it:
Forge Personal Connections
We tend to trust less in those we don’t know. It’s just a fact of life, and this is the same when dealing with your organisation. If you’re an enigma to your team, and you don’t know the people who work for you, then it’s going to be hard for anyone to trust anyone.
A good way to work around this is to schedule frequent 1:1 meetings with everyone who works for you. Even just a 15-minute meeting every week can be a great way to better understand people and also build a stronger connection with them.
It puts you more in tune with the issues your employees face, and it also reminds people they have someone to talk to when they’re dealing with a problem. This improves the quality of relationships between you and your team, which helps boost trust and transparency.
Work on Culture
To really make your organisation more transparent, you need to build transparency into everything you do. Being inconsistent is only going to send confusing messages to your employees, and so you need to work to make transparency a part of your culture.
How? You ask. One good way to do this is to empower people to experiment with new ideas. People are often afraid to innovate because they fear failure will cause them to lose face, but if you can be open and honest with people about their ideas and demonstrate there will be no retribution for bad ideas, then you’ll find people will become more willing to open up to you.
Another thing to do is actively solicit feedback. People should feel comfortable speaking up when they see something isn’t being done as well as it could be, but you need to get them to this point by working hard to get their opinions. Over time, people will begin to trust that they can speak up, and this improves the overall function of the company.