My employers over the years have touted their transparency. They shared company financials during monthly or quarterly meetings, with the goal of assuring staff that the company was on the right track. Employees would share weekly (or daily!) lists of their ongoing projects to "show" the team that they were working.
Transparency is a good thing and should be celebrated, but without context, it's noise at best and misleading at worst. Both are problematic, for different reasons. Noise makes it hard to find signal — finding the actual, relevant information you need to make a decision. Misleading information — transparency for the purpose of manipulation — hides the truth, like that a company is really struggling, or even that the company is dying.
On the receiving end, we have to approach transparency with a healthy dose of skepticism. And ask ourselves: does this information accurately reflect the situation? Or should I ask more questions?
Revenue numbers are often misleading
I see posts all the time on LinkedIn: My company had $1 million in revenue! I earned $300,000 as a freelancer! We increased profits by 100% year-over-year!
Those statements lack a ton of context. Revenue isn't profit and companies have expenses (like employee expenses). Freelancers may subcontract some work to achieve a revenue number. Any percentage increase is meaningless unless you know a starting number (like what if profit last year was only $2,000?). Quarterly revenue numbers may not reflect a payment structure, like maybe a huge number of customers paid in a single quarter and it's an anomaly.
These are all examples of selective transparency. Companies cherry-pick positive data, with the purpose of making a situation look better than it really is. LinkedIn is flooded with such posts (I've learned to tune it out). It's usually meant to establish authority by providing social proof.
The same can happen internally when a company shares revenue numbers or other metrics. Leadership may want to only share the positives. This might be well-intentioned, or it might be to intentionally mislead employees. After all, if employees are concerned about the future of the company, they may leave.
I previously interviewed Nola Simon, a hybrid/remote futurist. She makes the distinction:
Transparency isn't necessarily trust. Transparency actually means that you want to know everything. You can “see” it, so you don't have to be uncomfortable. You don't have to sit in that unknown.
Selective transparency has unknowns, though employees (or people viewing a self-promotional post on LinkedIn) aren't aware of those unknowns. "You don't know what you don't know."
Note: I think salary transparency and freelancer pricing transparency are critical, but they also need the right context. Companies that share a salary range of $50,000 - $250,000 are not being transparent. I considered sharing my own freelance earnings this year — because freelance pricing is incredibly opaque — but lost my nerve. If I had, I would have shared the necessary context to make sense of the numbers, such as how many hours I worked, how much work I delivered, and my expenses. Instead, I wrote a more generalized summary here.
Oversharing and noise
Another way companies lack transparency is when so much information is shared that it's impossible to extrapolate what's meaningful. Tools like Slack, designed to increase transparency, often result in over-sharing. What if an important update is buried in a channel somewhere?
Requirements to share everything also lead to virtual presenteeism. Employees may post the required, "Here's what I'm working on!" in the appropriate channel or project management tool, when in reality, the work is lagging. Showing up doesn't equate results and prescribed status updates often mask what's actually happening.
The same is true for meetings that have no purpose other than to share what the team is working on. They may have been scheduled in the name of transparency, but it's another form of presenteeism.
These are all examples of transparency for the wrong reasons. Transparency should have a goal of building trust. It shouldn't be used to micromanage or shame people (tracking systems) or to falsely create a perception that one is getting meaningful work done.
We're all buried in notifications from all directions. Constant updates — even for the stated purpose of creating more transparency — simply create more noise.
Creating a better approach to transparency
There are a few things I think leaders, companies, or anyone sharing information publicly can do to foster transparency.
Prioritize clarity over volume. Make sure that updates, if necessary, are meaningful and only directed at people who need the information.
Develop guidelines around sharing. Companies can outline what should be shared, how, when, and with whom.
Explain company financials: If revenue information is shared, the appropriate context should be included. Additionally, companies shouldn't assume that employees understand detailed financials. Highlight the relevant information and explain anything that might be unclear.
In all instances, transparency should be surrounded by the appropriate context.
Questioning the information you're given is healthy. In many cases, companies are well-intentioned when they build systems around transparency. But in an information-sharing world, it feels like we're always on overload. Scaling back and proving the right information at the right time gives our brains a break, while still meeting the goal of transparency.
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