Company Culture, Diversity & Inclusion, Elements of Company Culture, FOR ALL, Leadership & Management, Recruiting
By Lauryn Sargent
I recently conducted an exit interview with a team member who had interned at Stories for a year. She gave great feedback. One thing surprised me: her favorite thing about her experience was our company-wide offsite, where we talk about our company鈥檚 financial performance. That was just a few weeks into starting with us. It was the least recent but most impactful experience for her.
鈥淚t was very clear how the work I did fit into how well the company performed financially when I could see the big picture,鈥� she said.
I shouldn鈥檛 be surprised. Transparency is a company culture best practice. It contributes to a culture of high trust. According to the newly-released book, A Great to Work Place for All, a high trust culture has proven positive side effects, including increased levels of innovation, stock market returns two to three times greater than the market average, and turnover rates approximately 50 percent lower than industry competitors (p. 23).
Most people would say they want to work for a transparent company (no one wants to be lied to). But, transparency is tricky because it doesn鈥檛 mean the same thing to every person. There are varying degrees of transparency.
How an organization pays its people, how they communicate their own financial performance, and how feedback is given within an organization can show varying degrees of a culture of transparency. Let鈥檚 take a further look at a few companies who are practicing transparent leadership.
Open Salaries
to show candidates what they would earn if they started working at Buffer, removing awkward negotiating back and forth. Even better: because Buffer has a distributed workforce, they included cost of living differences in the calculator.
For those that work for Buffer, it sets a transparency standard for the rest of the employee experience. to see what else Buffer does to keep transparency going once you鈥檙e a member of the team.
Financial Reporting
a bootstrapped SaaS company, has a public-facing dashboard that shows all their financial metrics in real time, to include monthly recurring revenue and run rate, and daily updates that show converting and churning customers. In the name of transparency, this is a bold move. However, Baremetrics sells real time dashboards, so this is also a product demo.
Profitability is one the core values at , a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications. Yet, from 2005 until just last year, they were not a profitable company. At the this past spring, Workday
In response to a question about why profitability is listed last as a value, and what investors might thought about that, Bhusri answered: 鈥淲ell, our stock hit an all-time high today,鈥� before adding: 鈥淏ecause we鈥檙e finally profitable.鈥�
Frank Feedback
In what鈥檚 become a classic story, one day Ray Dalio, founder and former CEO of investment management firm , got an email from a colleague that said this:
鈥淩ay, you deserve a D-minus for your performance today in the meeting. You did not prepare at all because there was no way you could have been that disorganized.鈥�
Not only did Ray share it within the company, but he showed it to more than 1,800 TED talk attendees and 2 million viewers ().
鈥淚sn't that great?" Dalio said to the audience. "That's great. It's great because I need feedback like that."
Bridgewater is known for a culture of radical transparency, with several interesting yet controversial programs. They are an example of how a totally transparent organization isn鈥檛 right for all of us. Twenty-five percent of new Bridgewater employees leave before 18 months. Someone considering a career at Bridgewater may agree with the idea of radical transparency, but it鈥檚 entirely different to experience it in practice. Bridgewater records most conversations and has been known to publicly rank their managers, which could be uncomfortable for some.
Bridgewater鈥檚 culture of frank feedback might be a degree too far. Transparent salaries at Buffer might not be enough. But hearing specific stories from employees help gauge how comfortable you would be in a specific environment, especially if transparency is important to you.
At Stories Inc., we don鈥檛 share salaries. We don鈥檛 have a running dashboard that shows how we鈥檙e doing at every point and time, and we don鈥檛 rank performance publicly. But one day we might take another step in that direction, after learning about high trust culture performance from 逸遊娛樂城. After hearing that sharing our financial results twice a year further connected a team member to our company and established trust from the beginning, we want to do more.
It鈥檚 an interesting thought to test your organization鈥檚 transparency threshold to see if it increases trust and engagement. What are you doing to expand transparency within your organization?
Order your copy of A 逸遊娛樂城 For All: Better for Business, Better for People, Better for the World today!
