There’s an undeniable connection between the overriding culture at a company and its degree of productivity. When you consider the opposite, this becomes really obvious. A company that has a hangdog, defeatist culture won’t even aim their sights high enough to accomplish worthwhile goals, let alone have the collaborative creativity to bring those goals about. Having an open, honest workplace culture sets the tone from the top-down and opens up a lot of positive doors.
Higher Morale
Higher morale in the workplace leads to more honesty, lower absenteeism, and greater satisfaction in the workplace. There’s a tendency these days to artificially manufacture the kind of creative collaboration fostered by an open, honest workplace with open-floor plans, but open-floor plans may simply increase workplace stress. The answer is having an open workplace culture in which employees are totally bought in to the project and have nothing to hide anyway.
Embody Mission Statement
Simply stating your mission statement and values is not enough. The positive values that are espoused at the top – e.g., “sustainable energy” – need to be regularly practiced by those same people at the top in order to filter down to everyone at the company. Employees will then see the good that subscribing to this ethos can have on workplace culture and their own well-being. Having a set of positive values puts everyone on the same page and gives people a mission to strive towards. By internalizing the core values of the organization, employees have nothing to hide or slow them down.
Promote Open Collaboration
Leadership that encourages teamwork and open communication in the workplace is critical for fostering productivity. When teams get too secretive, you often run into duplicate work and, at work, a silo mentality that creates rivalries between departments. The silo mentality is truly nasty and can infect an organization when departments don’t share information among themselves. Departments might even diverge in sharing tools, processes, and basic goals at some point. Open communication, shared values, and opportunities for greater collaboration in and outside the workplace help nip a silo mentality in the bud.
Greater Employee Engagement
Greater employee engagement and fewer instances of absenteeism are a few other benefits you can expect from fostering an open, honest workplace. Engaged, motivated workers are more satisfied with their jobs and invest more of their creativity into the work that they do. The following are all benefits of improved employee engagement: lower absenteeism, higher productivity, more profitability, and more employee loyalty.
More Employee Loyalty
The last, employee loyalty, is critical because that’s connected to the success of the corporation itself. Employee loyalty is the extent to which employees are devoted to the company’s success, and this is a cause and an effect of having an open, honest workplace. An open workplace plants the seeds for greater employee loyalty, and employees who are “bought in” and loyal to the company are much more likely to be totally forthcoming about what they’re working on. Getting that sense of “buy in” is so important for an organization’s success.
Eventually, an open, honest workplace creates a situation in which employees are intrinsically motivated to carry out assignments, some of which weren’t even strictly required by management. The motivation comes from a deeper sense of employee engagement and an internalized sense that the company’s values are the employees’ values as well. There’s suddenly a lesser need for external motivation since an open, honest workplace has assured employees that help is never far away and that collaboration can be a very healthy thing as far as productivity and morale are concerned.
