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OPINION
Complete transparency
Open up and embrace full company transparency, not just financial, to enhance your firm’s culture.
F inancial transparency in the AEC industry is gaining quite a bit of traction these days. It makes sense: Help employees understand how they individually impact the numbers, and each can now help the team work toward common goals, not to mention fulfillment and stability within the company. By allowing employees to understand the finances of the firm and what those numbers mean, employees can understand their worth, make or suggest improvements and efficiencies, and see how to directly impact the company’s bottom line. With the success of financial transparency, then, what would an approach of embracing full company transparency (not just financial) look like?
Matt Hoying, P.E.
At Choice One Engineering, we have found the real value of transparency goes farther when everything is transparent – not just the numbers. This broad sweeping transparency of culture, organizational growth, people development, etc., provides employees the knowledge to truly make an impact on the organization. Yes, it’s hard sometimes, especially when individual lives are impacted when an employee is let go or when a costly mistake is shared companywide so all can learn. But the benefits of dispelling rumors and helping employees feel confident in the direction of the company is worth the short-term pain of being transparent when it matters most. Not sure about transparency? A common concern heard about making a shift from opaqueness to
transparency is that now there is no “barrier” between leadership and everyone else. Leadership actually has to do what they say they are going to do, or actually have to care about the things that they say they care about. If that is truly a concern, we suggest not venturing into transparency quite yet. We would suggest a better place to start improving your organization would be to begin evaluating your leadership team to understand if they are sending mixed signals. Make sure you and your leadership team have clarity about your company priorities (management, culture, financials, etc.) and what each aspect means. Culture to you, for example, may mean something different than culture to your next level leader. That clarity will be important as you introduce
See MATT HOYING , page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 17, 2022, ISSUE 1461
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