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How to Improve Transparency of Your Organization With Real-Time Communication

Business success is not about how you reach there but about retaining it. It all comes down to trusting onto others. One way to build trust is by fostering employee-first strategy & transparency in the workplace. Transparency helps thrive seamless communication and employee performance. If you are worried about your organization not meeting transparency at several levels, read ahead.

How much transparency is the real question?

To get a better understanding of how an organization can improve transparency, we would have to move through the hierarchy.

It is not only about transparency through the hierarchy; in fact, it is more about transparency among the leaders. The top-level management should deliver a clear line of sight into the company’s plans and strategies, good or bad. Communicating decisions or plans & recognizing implementable feedbacks are crucial.

This is where CIOs come in, CIOs play a pivotal role in managing the information flow –  when & how decisions or plans are communicated to all the departments. For improving transparency, top-level management has to ensure that there is a two-way street when decisions are taken. If the organization does not have an effective feedback communication system in place, it is a sign of a workplace where trust is last on the list of values promoted.

Mid-level hierarchy maintains a two-way honest & effective communication from bottom to the top. On the one hand, they communicate company policies, strategies, and plan of action to the executive level. While on the other hand, they share actionable feedback, operational bottlenecks to the top hierarchy.

Where, when and what process you can use to improve transparency with real-time communication?

Real-time communication can be used to get rid of the latency in the transition of the information within the organization. We define “what process” along with the “when” below :

During the planning phase

Sharing the plans is merely an external fix. This starts with the sharing of information, which encloses even the tiniest details of your strategies. Encouraging sharing of actionable feedback on the plans/strategies will help build an environment of trust and gives everyone a sense of involvement. If a feedback or an estimation is needed during the planning phase, facilitating real time communication through the hierarchy can help get things done faster.

While making decisions that has organization-wide impact

Communicating decisions that have organization-wide impact can sometimes have after-effects that can be difficult to handle, say a larger layoff or taking back of benefits. The repercussion of negative impact decisions can be handled in a better way if transparency of the decision is promoted; like “why” of the decision might be communicated but real time communication will help judge the actual impact versus the estimated impact on the affected employees.

While managing projects

Project management has already seen its share of real-time communication tools. Great reports will have everything that can help make the best decisions, but as we know it those reports are unicorns. Reports typically lack context, to counter context in reports, product managers can communicate directly with the respective executive while reviewing the reports to get a better understanding of the information reported.

Apart from providing context to reports, real time communication can improve interdepartmental collaboration. Typically, marketing and sales department use real-time project tracking tools, to ensure both the departments are on the same page. Real time communication tools expose different department within the organization to the whole set of opportunities to collaborate. The downside is understanding which communication should be moved to asynchronous channels and managing permission of the information flow in project management.

Education & recruitment startups have been able to adapt to it but larger organizations have been skeptical in adopting real-time communication.

We would love to know how & where does your organization use real time communication? Moreover, if you think real time communication is not for you – drop us a line, we might change that for you.

 

Blog header image : Creative Common