Nowadays, the trends have completely changed, and companies have taken transparency much more seriously. Companies who try to protect their secrets to their success may produce the opposite effect. It discourages employee engagement and minimizes the potential of brand affinity in the current market.
Transparency has become the gold standard for all companies worldwide. The administrators are taking care of their companies by sharing everything. From the amount of money the leaders make to the diversity of the staff, entrepreneurs discuss everything in detail.
In this article, we will go through the essential tips for transparency in business. This article may guide you in how you interact with your business partners, clients, and employees fairly.
What is Transparency in Business?
Transparency in business means sharing information with your customers without any problem. It ensures that your target audience trusts your brand and maintains a healthy communication channel with you. It improves the corporation and engagement of your existing customers with your brand.
According to a study posted by the Journal of Business Ethics, transparency in business impacts the following factors:
- Customers’ trust
- Buying intention
- The overall attitude towards the brand
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
When your customers start trusting your brand, they will recognize it as a brand with integrity and competency. It also means that your customers would prefer to buy products and services from your website over your competitors. Customers will feel more satisfied with your brand when you check out how you fulfill their needs and requests.
Transparency in business operations also positively influences the performance of your employees. For example, if you upgrade your operations and make everything transparent to your staff and customers, you will appreciate your products and services more.
Importance of Transparency in Business
1) Establishes Trust
Transparency in business ensures that customers trust your brand. It creates a belief within the employees that they work for a company with high standards. According to research from the 2014 American Psychological Association Survey, 25% of employees fail to trust their employer. 50% of those employees feel that the lack of trust is because the employers are not straightforward with them and don’t discuss the company's overall vision openly.
Employees will be more committed to the overall vision when a company’s foundation is built on transparency. They fully understand the objectives and are willing to put their ideas forward, showcase their creativity, and be innovative in reaching those targets.
So how does a company maintain transparency within a particular workplace? The answer is direct and clear communication with the highest form of honesty. Communication must be two-way rather than just one individual dominating the discussions.
As a result of this approach, employees are committed to the process, whereas senior leadership prioritizes the company's overall strategy and current condition. Organizations with transparent leadership have a strong bond of trust and commitment from their employees.
2) Expands Relationships
Strong relationships with a company of strong foundations are established by showing transparency. According to a survey from the 2014 CareerBuilder, 37% of the 3,0008 employees were destined to leave their jobs due to a poor relationship or a lack of trust from the hierarchy.
The best way to improve relationships in a workplace is to have an open environment. A relaxed environment encourages transparency in business because it allows employees to share their ideas without judgment. Although this isn’t as easy as it seems, there are training programs available on the Internet that would enable people from all backgrounds to relate to one another without any judgment. They should engage in meaningful conversations to build trust and have the confidence to succeed as a group. Once you see employees open to interacting with one another, you will see a change in mood and company culture.
3) Improves Innovation
The reason why Apple and Amazon are two of the biggest companies in the world today is because they came up with new solutions to disrupt the marketplace effectively. If the company’s leader is transparent, they can identify their employee’s strengths and create a suitable combination to handle bigger problems. Your best solutions come from knowing what makes people tick and grasping their strengths.
If the employees feel that they are not trusted by their managers, they lose their motivation eventually. As a result, it hampers productivity and they are destined to leave the company. On the other hand, if the employees feel trusted, they think that they are part of a big organization and will have more confidence in getting their tasks done.
Important Tips for Transparency in Business
1) Admit Your Mistakes
Your ego is one of the biggest factors in determining the success of your brand. For example, your target audience will consider you a trustworthy brand if you have a humble attitude and admit your mistakes. By owning your mistakes, you can attain the benefits of transparency in business, create a distance between yourself and your competitors, and become a benchmark for the other agents. The best way to admit mistakes is to talk in humble and polite language with your customers.
However, it is also essential that you don’t take your humble attitude for granted. You cannot afford to make the same mistakes if you want to ensure that your customers are loyal to your brand.
Successful businesses use empathy marketing to promote their products, services, and brand. You can think like your customers and understand their interests and what they are trying to achieve. This proactive approach will ensure that your customers get exactly what they need.
2) Maintain Consistency
Businesses that understand the importance of transparency in businesses try to maintain consistency in their operations. If your business operations have inconsistency, your customers will get confused and refuse to trust your brand.
For example, if your customers suffer from hidden costs in their online purchases from your store, they will not trust your product prices in the future. Another example of inconsistency within business operations can be the difference in the refund policy. There can be a case in which the agent telling the refund policy to a customer could be different from what is written on the brand website.
3) Communicate During Waiting Time Durations
If your customers have ordered products and are getting shipped to their location, ensure that you maintain communication with them. You have to stay in touch with them until the product gets delivered. Once the product is delivered, you can ask them about its status, i.e., whether the product was received on time or damaged.
Stores that understand the importance of transparency in business try to practice this approach. If customers wait for a long time to receive their orders, they may feel helpless and frustrated. If you have automated your operations, the customers may not even know the steps to fulfill their needs. Therefore, it is better to tell your customers about the entire situation.
For example, mail delivery services can inform them about the shipment status after every checkpoint. You can provide these updates on the company website and email the shipment tracking code to your customers.
4) Encourage Customer Feedback
If you want to know what kind of transparency in business your customers want to see, you can ask them directly. Customer feedback has always been pivotal for business growth. If your customers oversee many problems within your business operations, you should never ignore their opinion. You should take their perspective about how your operations are designed the way they are.
Maintain Transparency in Your Strikingly Website
If you want to reap the benefits of transparency in business, you may need to come out of your comfort zone and develop new strategies. One strategy is relying on an effective website builder like Strikingly. Strikingly is a top-quality website builder that allows you to build your professional website within a few hours and keep it up-to-date. We provide you with a complete range of tools that ensures that you create an attractive website for your viewers. Our website editor is easy to use, and it allows you to update your content easily.
Strikingly provides its users with mobile-responsive website templates, which means that you can manage your platform anytime and anywhere. We provide our users with a drag-and-drop feature, so you don’t need to deal with programming and coding while creating your website design.
Image taken from Strikingly
Once you have built an attractive website, you can add a privacy policy page to your platform to show you maintain transparency in business. This will make it easy for your customers to trust and engage with your brand. It will only be a matter of time before they start purchasing from your website.
Conclusion
Nobody knows about your business plans more than you. You are the final authority when it comes to understanding what works best for your website. Transparency in business is not about a one-size-fits-all solution in which certain elements do not fit your culture, but it doesn’t mean you ignore it. You must determine your specific needs and the route to get there.
The importance of transparency in business can be seen by the fact that it develops healthy relationships in the workplace and increases buy-in from your employees. If your company is struggling in this department, you shouldn’t hesitate to create an accountability framework. Transparency is not rocket science, but it is important and should be documented properly.
