April 9
Improving performance through transparency
Transparency is a popular buzz word on Wall Street these days, and many investors are demanding it. However, transparency doesn’t only serve outsiders trying to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your company, transparency can play a valuable role inside the company walls, as well.
By sharing numbers with employees, not just executives, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership. However, being open is not enough. You need to be sure your employees are trained to understand financial statements and have enough insight into their own jobs to know how to affect the numbers.
How to ensure successful performance measurement?
The Watson Wyatt WorkUSA survey report indicates that employee engagement is critical to productivity and employee turnover. Engagement is:
“Focus and direction that enable employees to understand what to do to make their organizations successful.”
The study concludes:
“Companies can sustain engagement over the long haul by creating a culture of continuous engagement built on strong strategic direction and leadership, intense customer focus, equitable rewards and effective internal communication. Companies that excel in these areas can enjoy better individual and organizational performance and deliver superior long-term financial results.”
But do remember to celebrate milestones once they have been reached. Taking the time to celebrate is important because it acknowledges people’s hard work, boosts morale and keeps up the momentum. If you want something to grow, pour champagne on it.
High performance and success are not dependent on one simple factor or as a result of one or two things. The entire context you operate in greatly impacts your results.
Short URL & Title:
Improving performance through transparency — http://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/lcy
[...] & Responsibility By daltonbyrne I saw a link to Torben Rick’s new presentation on Transparency. I read it with interest as there is a similarity to how Dalton Byrne approach common [...]
Rick… Truly excellent points! More and more our world is transparent. It can be uncomfortable if you’re not used to sharing data, and only use it to “report upward” to higher management. Yet, we all talk about making our staff involved and empowered. We need data to manage, worker need data to produce. If your staff has been tasked with lifting performance, they need to know their true goals and they need to know how their efforts contribute towards that goal. They may not need every bit of data you receive, but somewhere in your management reports are the key data points that they do need.
Rick, nice post. Agree transparency critical nowadays, internally and externally too.
Beyond transparency, isn’t the use of scalable two-way collaboration with all constituents becoming increasingly important? Customers/clients and staff on the ground are likely to have valuable input into everything, incl. product/service design and marketing efforts, incl. preferred forms of communication.