The transparency revolution

Your customers. Your employees. Your board members. Friends. Family. All of them are more enlightened than ever before. With a few clicks, they can find answers to the most tangible questions.

The world is going digital. The internet is making everything more transparent. From intangible to tangible. That’s what we are getting used to.

You see it everywhere. Uber will tell you how the driver who is picking you up normally performs. Airbnb tracks your apartment and your ability to behave when staying with others. On Upwork, they can tell you how the app developer did the last time he built something. And so it continues. How is that movie? Let’s check IMDB. How is that restaurant? Let’s check it on Yelp. We are getting used to transparency everywhere.

This comme il faut has widespread consequences.

Below, I will highlight a few as I see them before offering you some tangible advice on how you can begin your own transparency revolution.

Employee retention

Even now, some businesses and leaders do not default to transparency. Some for lack of understanding of its importance. Others for not having realized how easy sharing data has become these days.

This holds a potential risk for you as a company.

As your employees get increasingly used to having access to most information in most instances, they will expect this from their workplace as well. Companies who neglect to embrace this will potentially see a decrease in employee motivation and a connected increase in employees leaving the company.

Make your decisions data-driven

Try. Measure. Rethink. Repeat. More than ever, businesses have an opportunity to track and learn from their actions, so it would be a vast mistake not to do so. Build your ideas on gut feeling and passion, make decisions on data.

It’s everywhere these days, data. You should proactively exploit this potential. However, it must be done carefully. Too much information can be demotivating and the wrong data can be misleading. What you focus your teams on must be chosen carefully. The marketing team needs one set of data. Customer service, another. Developers, a third, and your sales staff, a fourth. What’s most important is that you focus the teams on what’s core to the overall strategy of your company.

Knowing the score is important

Moving a company in the right direction is a result of a lot of people's individual action. In recent years, OKRs (objectives and key results) have been a popular management tool, especially amongst tech companies, to ensure this.

Objectives are what you want to accomplish and are aspirational. Key Results, on the other hand, are concrete and specific. They describe how you will accomplish an objective, as well as measure whether you accomplished the objective or not.

To increase your employees’ motivation is to achieve these key results, both at an individual level, but also in the name of friendly competition within the team. Displaying these key results transparently, instantly, and continuously is also a great way to hold people accountable. Who is performing well? Who could improve their performance? It should not be a secret. It’s the truth and it should be disclosed and talked about.

How to take the first steps towards transparency

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be so hard to act more transparent. It can actually be quite easy and you can start today. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Create a free trial account with Klipfolio
2. Sign up for a workshop to learn how to build your own dashboards in Klipfolio
3. Purchase Airtame to display your dashboards on monitors around your office

About Airtame

Airtame is a small wireless HDMI device that plugs into the HDMI port of any screen or projector. Unlike other wireless HDMI devices, nothing is plugged into your computer or smartphone. Simply download our app and stream your content to the screen from any major computer platform, tablet, or smartphone. When you connect it to a WiFi network, everyone can connect to the Airtame too. We think that’s pretty cool.

And when no one is streaming to the TV, you can set the default display to show a website or dashboard (like Klipfolio) for something functional, like sales numbers, or just to show something easy on the eyes, like your company logo. But that’s just what it does now. We have a very ambitious plan for a wireless future.

Learn how easy it is to track your data now

Also see:

• We tried out Airtame for our own wallboards - here are the results
• How to set up a TV dashboard
• On calm technology and business dashboards