Transparency- open communication and accountability

Schedules, budgets, and results are transparent. Issues are made clear by the project manager
to avoid as many surprises as possible. Bottom-up project management can also be viewed as a
way of coping with the increasing gap between the information necessary to manage knowledge
workers and the ability of managers to acquire and apply this information.
What transparency is about is hard to capture in just one sentence. It is about sharing all the
information the receiver wants or needs, and not just the information that the sender is willing to
share. It is about putting all facts on the table, even when some of them are uncomfortable. It is
about being honest and open about what actions are taken, by whom and on what grounds. It is
about enabling people to have conversations where questions can be asked and answered in
open and honest ways, creating mutual understanding. It is about removing any barriers that
hinder people from accessing the information they could need to be better at their jobs. It is
about making people and their skills, knowledge and ideas visible and accessible to all their
colleagues.
Transparency. What exactly does it mean when associated with organizational culture? Its giving
employees unfiltered insight into a companys operations and future. Its giving employees a
voice. And most of all, its trust.
Many companies are still trying to figure out how to build a culture of transparency, but they
dont know where to start. Follow these three rules, and youll be able to bridge that gap in
employee-manager relationships.
Hold All-Hands Meetings
Regardless of how big your company is, all-hands meetings are the key to transparency.
Gathering employees into one room makes sharing information easier than sending out a
company-wide email. When everyones on the same page, it prevents information from getting
miscommunicated from one person to the otherthe corporate telephone game.
Use these meetings to share financial updates, wins (losses, too!), and any company goals.
Making leadership visible is a powerful message to employees. It shows that management is
eager to share information and isnt trying to build a fence around what employees should be
told.
Give Employees A Virtual Suggestion Box
Every employee has something to say. More often than not, theyre hesitant to directly approach
their manager about an issue, concern, or suggestion. To solve the problem: give them an
anonymous virtual suggestion box.
But the saying is true, Actions speak louder than words. Managers need to act upon these
suggestions in order to build trust with their employees.
Consider presenting these suggestions during meetings. Take this chance to deliberate as a
group and vote on what action should be taken. Itll show that managers are interested in
sharing the feedback theyre getting, and that theyre willing to hear their employees voices.
Let Employees Stay Connected
Employees need a way to instantly connect with one another. Instant messaging or platforms
that encourage collaboration allow employees to interact across teams, departments, or the
whole company.
Basically, getting employees and managers to open up through communication streamlines the
process of information sharing. People teach each other. They learn from each other. It provides
insight as to how other departments operate, which breaks down cross-departmental animosity.

Trust cant be built overnight. But instilling the three rules above are the first steps you should
take to building a culture of transparency.
Transparency, as used in science, engineering, business, the humanities and in other social
contexts, implies openness, communication, and accountability. Transparency is operating in
such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed. It has been defined
simply as "the perceived quality of intentionally shared information from a sender".Transparency
is practiced in companies, organizations, administrations, and communities.[2] It guides an
organization's decisions and policies on the disclosure of information to its employees and the
public, or simply the intended recipient of the information.
Recent research suggests there are three primary aspects of transparency relevant to
management practice: information disclosure, clarity, and accuracy.[1] To increase transparency,
managers actively infuse greater disclosure, clarity, and accuracy into their communications with
stakeholders. For example, managers that voluntarily share information related to the firm's
ecological impact with environmental activists are demonstrating disclosure; managers that limit
the use of technical terminology, fine print, or complicated mathematical notations in their
correspondence with suppliers and customers are demonstrating clarity; and managers that do
not bias, embellish, or otherwise distort known facts in their communications with investors are
demonstrating accuracy. The strategic management of transparency therefore involves
intentional modifications in disclosure, clarity, and accuracy to accomplish the organization's
specific objectives.[1]
Alternatively, radical transparency is a management method where nearly all decision making is
carried out publicly. All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, all final
decisions, and the decision making process itself are made public and remain publicly archived.
This approach has grown in popularity with the rise of the Internet.[5] Two examples of
organizations utilizing this style are the GNU/Linux community and Indymedia.
Corporate transparency, a form of radical transparency, is the concept of removing all barriers to
and the facilitating of free and easy public access to corporate information and the laws,
rules, social connivance and processes that facilitate and protect those individuals and
corporations that freely join, develop, and improve the process.[6]
Non-governmental organizations[edit]
Accountability and transparency are of high relevance for non-governmental organisations
(NGOs). In view of their responsibilities to stakeholders, including donors, sponsors, programme
beneficiaries, staff, states and the public, they are considered to be of even greater importance
to them than to commercial undertakings.[7] Yet these same values are often found to be lacking
in NGOs.[7]
The International NGO Accountability Charter, linked to the Global Reporting Initiative,
documents the commitment of its members international NGOs to accountability and
transparency, requiring them to submit an annual report, among others.[8][9] Signed in 2006 by
11 NGOs active in the area of humanitarian rights, the INGO Accountability Charter has been
referred to as the first global accountability charter for the non-profit sector.[10] In 1997, the
One World Trust created an NGO Charter, a code of conduct comprising commitment to
accountability and transparency.[11]
Media[edit]
Media Transparency is the concept of determining how and why information is conveyed through
various means.

If the media and the public knows everything that happens in all authorities and county
administrations there will be a lot of questions, protests and suggestions coming from media and
the public. People who are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions.
Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political processes by media and the
public. One tool used to increase everyday participation in political processes is Freedom of
Information legislation and requests. Modern democracy builds on such participation of the
people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the decisions at all levels in
society.[12]
For example, a cashier making change after a point of sale transaction by offering a record of the
items purchased (e.g., a receipt) as well as counting out the customer's change on the counter
demonstrates one type of transparency.
The Global Reporting Initiative (known as GRI) is an international independent standards
organization that helps businesses, governments and other organizations understand and
communicate their impacts on issues such as climate change, human rights and corruption.
Founded in 1997, GRI is a non-profit organization with its Secretariat in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. GRI produces one of the world's most widely used standards for sustainability
reporting; also known as ecological footprint reporting, environmental social governance (ESG)
reporting, triple bottom line (TBL) reporting, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting.
Triple bottom line (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL) is an accounting framework with three parts:
social, environmental (or ecological) and financial. These three divisions are also called the three
Ps: people, planet and profit, or the "three pillars of sustainability". Interest in triple bottom line
accounting has been growing in both for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors. Many
organizations have adopted the TBL framework to evaluate their performance in a broader
context.[1] The term was coined by John Elkington in 1994
The Latin etymology of the word transparency is bipartite, consisting of trns meaning across
or through and pre meaning be seen. In the physical sciences, the MerriamWebster
Dictionary defines a transparent object as having the property of transmitting light without
appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are seen clearly. Social scientists have
metaphorically adopted this definition to connote the ability of interested parties to see through
otherwise private information to understand the intentions of the sender. The field of finance has
done much to study the effects of transparency across a broad range of industrial settings. Such
studies generally investigate transparency as the inherent quality of information in institutional
communications. However, researchers in finance have not yet come to consensus on a single
theoretical definition to describe the basic dimensions of transparency (Bloomfield & OHara,
1999). Be that as it may, scholars from a variety of research domains have noted the importance
of understanding the critical role of institutional communications (e.g., employment contracts) on
organizational behavior (e.g., Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Eisenhardt, 1989; Rosengren,
1999; Weick 1987). Therefore, this study builds a Andrew Schnackenberg 3 comprehensive
definition of transparency based on literature in finance and empirically investigates its
constituent parts against important organizational constructs such as trust. Empirical studies
investigating transparency in finance have analyzed it as both the dependent variable (Hodge,
Kennedy, & Maines, 2004; Patel et al., 2002) and independent variable (Board & Sutcliffe, 2000;
Gemmill, 1996; Rosengren, 1999; Winkler, 2000) under question. Some studies define
transparency as the timely disclosure of information (e.g., Bloomfield & OHara, 1999; Madhavan,
Porter, & Weaver, 2005; Pagano & Roell, 1996; Securities and Exchange Commission, 1995;
Securities and Investment Board, 1995) while other studies define transparency as the level of
clarity in information (Bushman, Piotroski, & Smith, 2004; Jordan, Peek, & Rosengren, 2000;
Winkler, 2000). Still others studies define transparency as the level of accuracy in information
(Flood, Huisman, Koedijk, & Mahieu, 1999; Granados, Gupta, & Kauffman, 2006). Overall, the
literature in finance appears to ascribe three primary dimensions to the construct of
transparency. Namely, transparency is the degree to which information is disclosed, clear, and

accurate. Van Dijk, Duysters, and Beulens (2003) argue that transparency is dynamically
constructed between institutions and individuals through exchanges of information construction
and interpretation. In essence, transparency is seen as both enacted and perceived in
institutional communications. The literature in finance is primarily focused on understanding
transparency as an enacted phenomenon (i.e., as the sending of accurate, disclosed, and clear
information). Yet Van Dijk, Duysters, & Beulens (2003) argue that the level of transparency in
systems is ultimately determined by its perception rather than its enactment. To date, no
instrument has been developed to measure cross-context perceptions of transparency. Hence,
this study takes Andrew Schnackenberg 4 initial steps towards development of a comprehensive
psychometric instrument to measure perceptions of transparency. To accomplish this, each
enacted dimension of transparency identified in the literature is reframed to account for its
perception. Specifically, transparency is defined as the level of perceived completeness (i.e.,
disclosure), understandability (i.e., clarity), and correctness (i.e., accuracy) in messages,
documents, or other institutional communications (Table 1). Within this framework, completeness
refers to the perceived quantity of information in messages or other communications as well as
the availability of that information to interested parties, correctness is defined as the degree to
which material claims are made truthfully and reflect truthful qualifications about their perceived
validity, and understandability is defined as the extent to which representations are designed in
ways that are understandable to focal audiences (Figure 1). Recent literature has suggested that
transparency and trust are intricately related concepts (Pirson & Malhotra, 2008). However, the
relationship between trust and transparency has yet to be empirically examined. Hence, this
paper reports the results of a quasi experiment conducted to investigate the relationship
between perceptions of transparency and organizational tru
Its ironic that a word like transparency can have several confusing meanings, even in a business
context. While transparency as a concept is often most visible in the realm of social responsibility and
compliance, its real benefit is when its seen as a business priority.
Transparency is about information. It is about the ability of the receiver to have full access to the
information he wants, not just the information the sender is willing to provide. Transparency embodies
honesty and open communication because to be transparent someone must be willing to share information
when it is uncomfortable to do so. Transparency is an individual being honest with himself about the
actions he is taking. Transparency is also the organization being upfront and visible about the actions it
takes, and whether those actions are consistent with its values. What would cause someone act contrary
to his or her values? What are the influences and factors inside an organization that cause individuals to
veer from actions or decisions that they do not believe are right?
In an organization where there is alignment between their Standards and their Values, there is no fear in
raising or disclosing difficult issues. A value of honesty is consistent with the ability to act on ones
concerns, or ask questions. Employees and managers can safely admit mistakes and can openly deal with
problems and challenges. There is true open communication. If an engineer raises a concern about
product quality, for example, that person is given a chance to be heard and have the issue either resolved.
The engineer may not be correct, but there is enough respect that if he or she is wrong, they are given an
opportunity to learn why, and the encounter has a positive outcome.
For employees to trust in transparency, they must first feel safe: physically, financially, and emotionally.
Undue pressure and fear of losing ones job make it difficult to take the risk of admitting mistakes or
weakness. Employees must feel they have a personal relationship with their leaders to the point where
they would feel comfortable having a conversation that involves some risk.
As an example of the strategic importance of transparency, look at the challenges that have plagued
Johnson & Johnson in recent years. The manner in which J&J handled the 1982 Tylenol crisis has always
been the model of transparency; an organization acting in a manner consistent with its values. J&J

immediately pulled the product from the shelves without regard to the cost or public embarrassment, and
certainly with no regrets over lost profits. In repeated interviews Jim Burke said that J&Js Credo made it
easy for him and his team to know exactly what to do: J&Js first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses,
and patients, to the mothers and all the others who use our products and services.
In stark contrast to how Jim Burke handled the 1982 crisis, McNeil leadership under Colleen Goggins has
been described as evasive and not forthcoming. Consultant to over-the-counter drug companies, Donald
Riker, was quoted as saying, At every step in this process J&J has not been transparent. Every bit of
information is cagey, secretive, and micromanaged.
Companies with cultures that are working for them and not against them are ones where transparency is
seen as an internal imperative, and not a external disclosure requirement.
- See more at: http://managementhelp.org/blogs/business-ethics/2011/03/14/transparency-is-a-key-toperformance/#sthash.H9b8Hnc7.dpuf