Transparency is a powerful, energizing concept.  Sharing information with transparency to all stakeholders is critical when creating a “Healthy” culture.  Incorporating a healthy culture adds to a company’s performance and life expectancy much like living a healthy lifestyle. Logically, a “Healthy” Culture” that demonstrates ownership thinking and behavior can provide better and more consistent care within healthcare organizations. The culture can create the value equivalent of 4% to 12% positive net operating margin in most cases.

Top 10 examples of “Healthy” cultural business practices include:

1. Open and transparent communication
2. No “secrets” rumor environment
3. Constructive dialog
4. High trust, collaboration
5. Effective delegation
6. Innovation
7. Coaching focus for development
8. Structured approach to talent appointment
9. Compelling sense of purpose/mission
10. A passion for exceptional service and caring

However, not all information handled by leaders is designed to be shared with everyone.  It can be uncomfortable by nature when the news is not good.  There may be challenges in deciding where to balance discretion with honesty, and there can be challenges with where you draw the line (how transparent).   In other words, one of the critical factors to consider when sharing information is deciding exactly who the stakeholders are.

In almost all cases, hiding facts, even nuances, from Senior Leadership can have disastrous consequences for both the far-reaching decisions that result, and also personally for the confidence lost in your ability to accurately frame executive decisions.

And you must tell subordinate leaders, who are the lifeblood of an organization, when they could be doing better or the organization’s performance will stagnate and suffer. One crucial feature of healthcare is narrow operating margins.  In such an environment, a company-wide difficulty with honest, constructive feedback can literally spell the difference between success and failure.

Objective measurement can be a frightening thing for people to hear, especially in public, when they are used to hearing they “look marvelous”.  It can be difficult for an organization to constructively manage without dysfunction, especially as they move from an opaque culture to one of translucency and then to transparency.

For example, it could be quite chilling to conduct a climate survey and then provide the entire company with the information as to who complained about what.  Presenting some information as if from a blind source can improve harmony especially if leadership acts on the issue as a serious concern without regard to or appearance of trying to find a source to “blame”.

Information about the relative performance between departments is very important for senior leadership to hear.  However, that same information, if released to a general audience, could hurt morale and further erode performance if one of those departments was struggling.

Individual performance results are best shared with supervisors, the individual leader or employee, and senior management.  It is not necessary for everyone to have access to this personal data as long as enough leadership is involved to ensure there is a consistent standard across the organization.  The exceptions are, naturally, when it is appropriate to praise someone for a job well done. Then you can’t have too many people around to hear this news.

Business practices assessments should be shared openly with everyone.  An honest assessment of the organization’s performance and where it is positioned with respect to competitors in its field, especially when embarking on a campaign to move up in those very rankings is fair to share across the entire company, to initiate a sense of competition and teamwork.  This kind of communication can bring almost a joyous sense of camaraderie to an organization.  You can just imagine the impact that would have on employee engagement.  The company’s vision, purpose, and performance, as a whole, against these public yardsticks are also valuable to share broadly and transparently.

Tools that are powerful in their ability to communicate, can be powerfully motivating and potentially discouraging.  Choosing the right stakeholders with whom to share this information must rest on what decisions need to be made and the impacts of the decisions.

Every one of Healthcare Performance Solutions’ tools is about the visual display of quantifiable information.  Since the power of our approach is “Visual” – it makes transparency “easier” when you decide to share it.

Click here to read about how our tools can improve transparency with judgment. 

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