6 Ways to make your organization more transparent
There’s a difference between honesty and transparency. I’d be willing to say that the vast majority of Christian organizations are honest. I’d also be willing to say that many Christian organizations fail to consistently exhibit full transparency.
Think of full transparency as intentional honesty. From an organizational perspective, it’s the practice and discipline of seeking to openly and proactively share just about everything – strategy, financials, schedules, project plans, etc. – for the purpose of creating trust and engagement.
At first blush, churches and other ministries might be reluctant to introduce full transparency (for a variety of reasons), but there's good evidence from the corporate world that the benefits outweigh any perceived “risks”:
Harvard Business Review conducted an employee engagement survey a few years ago, which showed that 70 percent of employees are most engaged when they’re consistently provided information on their company’s strategic initiatives.
A survey by TINYPulse showed that management transparency had a correlation coefficient of 0.94 with employee happiness.
A study shows that 94 percent of stakeholders are likely to be loyal to a brand that offers complete transparency.
Corporate examples of transparency are aplenty. HubSpot shares just about everything with its employees: exhaustive financial information, board and leadership meeting presentation decks and strategic plans among other things. Zappos provides tours of their facilities (and inner workings) to outsiders. Patagonia goes to great lengths to provide transparency into its supply chain logistics.
The common denominator: people
Our thesis at Seven Marches is that ministries can learn from the principles and concepts deployed in the business world, and transparency is no exception. Ministry-based organizations and businesses have at least one pretty big thing in common – people. And, all people want to feel like they're "in the know". Whether they work for a Fortune 500 company or a small church, they want to understand the challenges, the opportunities, the joys – and how their position connects the dots to the mission. And, whether they're customers or worshipers, they want to understand how the organization they support utilizes its resources and plans for the future.
So you might not need to worry about international supply chain logistics, but here are six simple ways to introduce more transparency into your organization:
1. Send video recaps of your leadership meetings. When I led meetings with our executive team at my former company, we started noticing some of our team members staring through the glass walls of the conference room as if we were staging a Mystery Theatre show. What are they talking about? How are they going to deal with the crisis we're in? What changes are they going to make? We did one simple thing to turn the "they" into "we."
At the end of our weekly leadership team meeting, I'd ask the team for the five key takeaways from the meeting, and then immediately after the meeting, I'd record a five-minute video and send it to everyone in the organization. Before the ink was even dry on the meeting minutes, every single employee knew what we had discussed. There are tools like Vidyard or BombBomb that make it extremely easy to use your laptop webcam to record a video and send it via e-mail. Want to add even more transparency? Consider rotating employees who are NOT part of your leadership team into your meeting each week.
2. Create an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) channel in Slack. Not using Slack yet? It's like a hybrid of the best parts of e-mail and the best parts of texting and can radically change the way your team communicates, leading to more empathy and transparency.
An "Ask Me Anything" channel allows anyone who works in the organization at any time to ask the leader a question – any question. The leader can certainly answer the question directly in Slack, but it’s often better to compile the questions and answer them during the monthly all-hands meeting (one of the five meeting types we prescribe in our Meetings March). Slido even allows you to collect questions in advance and has Slack integration (though some of the features are being retired later this month.)
3. Share personal calendars. This might require a leap of faith for some, but this can be especially transformational when the organizational leader is willing to allow anyone on the team access to his or her calendar. Not only does it provide immediate insight into availability, but it also helps team members better understand their colleagues’ priorities.
Mathilde Collin, the CEO of Front – an e-mail collaboration tool – found that trust skyrocketed after sharing her calendar. "Trust is a big reason why people are happy at work. It comes from lots of different things, not just sharing my calendar, but employees always know what I’m doing, and that creates less stress and more engagement.” (And, if employees happen to see a weekly round of golf on your calendar? Well, they know you're taking a little bit of time for you – is that such a bad thing?)
4. Post your priorities each day. Many organizations have “daily huddles” where they gather teams together for 10-15 minutes and discuss their top objectives for the day. The idea is great, but in this day and age of virtual teams and scattered schedules (not to mention the work-from-home rhythm that's a reality of COVID-19), it can be hard to get everyone in the same room (or even on the same video call) for 10-15 minutes each day.
That’s why we again turn to Slack. Create a channel called “Daily Priorities” and require every team member to post their top priority for the day by 9 a.m. Don't overthink it. In a perfect world, each priority is moving the team closer to what Seven Marches calls the "Golden Goal" (the single, all-important goal that's driving the organization toward its mission), but some days, the priority might be as simple as catching up on important e-mails. Slack even allows for checklist formatting, which means each team member can mark their priority as complete.
5. Use Asana to make project plans available to everyone. Why not go beyond daily priorities and let everyone in the organization track planning and progress on everyone's quarterly projects and goals? Asana is a work management software tool that provides powerful ways to manage and collaborate on projects – and then make those plans transparent and accessible.
Organizational leaders love this because it provides constant and instant snapshots of progress (or obstacles that are limiting progress) – but it's also helpful for others in the organization who have cross-dependencies. For example, let's say you coordinate social media for your church. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could view the project plan for an upcoming Fall Festival on campus, so you knew what to publicize and how to help ensure success? (By the way, we're certified Asana pros and can help you master the software.)
6. Hold a Town Hall. Town halls aren't just for politicians. They can be a great way for ministries – especially churches – to keep their stakeholders in the know. While the first five items on this list are meant to build transparency within an organizational team, this one helps to build transparency with its external stakeholders. (In some ways, this an extension of the Ask Me Anything channel to an even broader community.)
Just to be clear, a church town hall is NOT a voters meeting. The purpose is for the leader to provide some brief updates on the state of the organization (strategic goals, etc.) – and more importantly, to allow for questions. At my former church, we held a series of town halls as we moved to a Policy Governance model – this helped our community to better understand the reason for the transition, as well as some of the key changes that would be introduced. Capture a video recording of the town hall and make that available to those who couldn't attend. Here's the other benefit of a Town Hall – you get to listen and take the temperature of your stakeholders (a key component of our Messaging March).
If you're seeking to change the narrative in an organization that's been – well – less than transparent in the past, give yourself some time. As with any cultural shift, it's going to take repeated behaviors over a period of time. And, remember, organizational cultural changes start with individual behavioral changes. One person at a time. One day at a time.
