Opacity pays off in card games and surprise parties. At tech startups, however, transparency is key. Building a culture of transparency allows employees to fully understand what their company is working on, how projects are being managed as well as how the company would respond to a crisis.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’d be very good at my job if we had a culture with a lot of secrecy, Dave DeCaprio, CTO and Co-founder of ClosedLoop, said. “I’m a horrible poker player. I can do all the math, but I’m not a good bluffer. That’s probably information I shouldn’t be sharing this openly, but I guess my natural tendency is just toward transparency.”
There are several strategies that companies can use to create a culture of transparency, including accessible performance tracking, making calendars visible or sending around engagement surveys. Despite its name, ClosedLoop does all this and more to ensure employees have all the information they need to do their jobs well.
Read on to learn more about how ClosedLoop maintains transparency in the day-to-day operations as well as during times of uncertainty.
ClosedLoop is a healthtech company that uses artificial intelligence and healthcare data to make predictions on patient conditions and provide potential treatments, diagnoses and interventions.
What does transparency look like at ClosedLoop?
At ClosedLoop, we implement practices at the organizational level and as individual leaders to reinforce transparency.
Like many organizations, we establish quarterly goals across different levels of the company and track their progress using key performance indicators and weekly written updates. At ClosedLoop, these updates are accessible to all employees via Asana, our project management system. Any employee can see the updates on the sales pipeline, marketing outreach, system uptime, customer satisfaction, and HR initiatives, etc. All employees, from executives to individual contributors, can publicly discuss these updates within Asana. During our weekly executive team meetings, we are reviewing the same updates that the whole company sees.
As leaders, we set an example of transparency within the organization. One practice I personally follow is making my calendar visible to everyone. Around 90 percent of my schedule is public. I love the efficiency this generates. Often people see I have a meeting coming up and give me relevant updates without me asking. It lets everyone know I’m willing to sacrifice my privacy so the company can run a little more efficiently.
Around 90 percent of my schedule is public.’’
Why were these practices implemented at your organization?
When Andrew and I co-founded the company, we didn’t compare the pros and cons of various cultures and decide to be transparent. We just wanted everyone on the same page and so we gave them all the information we had and tried to explain how we were thinking about it. As we grew, we developed practices like the status updates I mentioned above, that allowed us to scale that approach to a larger team.
What are the outcomes of this level of transparency? What employee feedback have you received about these practices?
This is an area where we do have the data. We do regular engagement surveys with the team and consistently see employees rating us high on transparency.
Having transparency builds employee’s trust in the executive team, which is really important when a crisis hits. In a crisis, you can’t get all the information out to everyone fast enough and need to make a lot of decisions quickly. Day-to-day transparency helps build everyone’s trust in the company’s decision-making process so you can react quickly under pressure.
We saw this play out during the SVB collapse. We were affected by that, and within a couple hours we had the company assembled and explained the situation to everyone. We admitted what we knew and didn’t know at the time. The result was that we were able to quickly pull together a small team from across the organization to handle the situation, and everyone else was able to continue to focus on the main mission of the company. There was no time wasted in watercooler talk or the rumor mill. That situation turned out fine of course, but we knew we were prepared no matter what.
