5 Essential Steps Of Business Transparency
Lack of transparency in a business is one of the most common causes of collapse. Employees feel they can’t trust their leader. Leaders are suspicious of their teams. And customers do not know whether the brand is reliable. In other words, transparency can establish the reputation of your business at many levels. However, a common mistake is to confuse transparency for a candid approach to communication. Here is what it means to create a transparent strategy in your company.
#1. Use plain language
As a business, you need to get your message across to your audience group. However, it’s easy to fall into the trap of using complicated language and specialist jargon as an expert. Unfortunately, a business website that uses extensively complex language can exclude some readers. Using plan language makes your message more accessible to a broad audience. It ensures potential customers can understand your services and products.
#2. Share your ratings
How do customers know if they can trust you? Being transparent about your products and expertise in one thing. But showing what other customers think of your business can be a great way of revealing your true colors. Thankfully, plenty of online platforms, such as Google reviews on Google My Business, Feefo, and Trustpilot, can enable brands to collect reviews. According to Trustpilot, 88% of shoppers use star reviews when choosing a company or product. Consequently, a business with a visible rating system is more likely to appeal to future customers.
#3. Protect your teams
Transparency is built on trust. It may seem counterproductive to use video surveillance systems as part of your transparent strategy, but they make everyone accountable for business performance and quality. Indeed, you can introduce your CCTV solution as a tool that protects the business, ensuring employees are safe from unwanted intruders and dangerous customers. Additionally, you can also use the footage to protect your team, such as rejecting unfair customer claims when the camera shows otherwise. Creating a positive environment for CCTV is all about emphasizing protection rather than monitoring.
#4. Keep performance visible
How is the business doing? As a manager, you have a good understanding of your profits and losses. But more often than not, businesses keep their teams in the dark. Producing a monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or yearly update that keeps everyone in the loop can be a game-changer. You can help employees understand how their work affects the company’s results. From your team’s perspective, the process boosts engagement and brand commitment.
#5. Be accessible
The unavailable boss syndrome can harm the company. Bosses and workforces need to work together. When the boss remains distant and invisible, employees are likely to lose confidence in your skills. Professional management coaches call it managing by walking around, creating a culture of connectedness, accessibility, and trust. A leader that focuses on data-driven decisions only fails to reach out to the people in the team. As a result, the lack of interpersonal communication builds a favorable environment for mistrust. You need to be transparent to be trusted, but you also need to be visible to make transparency meaningful.
When 85% of disgruntled customers and employees agree that they are more likely to give a business a second chance if it has a history of transparent behavior, it makes sense to build a strategy for transparency. Transparency creates trust at every level within your business processes, whether you are reaching out to partners, suppliers, customers, or team members.