Transparency Wins 

• By Jana Al Hammouri

Your credibility is constantly judged based on your communication. Whether it be within your organization, amongst your employees, or externally amongst your audience and stakeholders. Your credibility sets the tone for your reputation, your approaches, and your environment overall. Therefore, you need to assess how effective your delivery is and how it can be better. You can drive confidence and certainty into your messaging. You need to know what, when, where, and how to convey assurance and credibility into your communication.  Communication needs to have intention. No matter the organization, incorporating a sense of purpose and practicality into your messaging and communication will translate into confidence and stability. 

Transparency is built on a solid foundation of internal communication. An organization is only as effective as those who work within it. Therefore, maintaining an updated and constant stream of tracked communication is vital in establishing community among staff and employees and ensuring efficiency.  By keeping everyone up to date, your team can function accordingly and can answer questions, address concerns, and progress in their work. However, transparency also means being direct about aspects such as timelines and possible or foreseeable concerns. Keeping your team out of the loop and dragging them along or rushing them into things will not build security and will instead damage your communicative foundation. Creating a reliable flow of proper and consistent communication keeps the organization transparent and the communication between levels precise. Thus, allowing colleagues to work easier and more effectively with one another. Another approach would be to ensure that the messaging itself is non-repetitive. Although consistent messaging is essential, repeating the same message over and over again can be tiring and dull, leaving your target audience uninterested. Therefore, communicating consistently in an informative approach while keeping the topic interesting and engaging is vital. Whether it be through different platforms, different formats or in other methods, providing various ways to understand the message you're trying to convey while still remaining engaging is critical. When communicating with your audience, frequent messaging needs to include something new and actionable. Another aspect of advice is making visible efforts to work towards promises and goals you've set out. Whether they be through tangible or visible means, by showcasing your work towards accomplishing what you've set out to achieve, you create a palpable feeling of certainty, especially in times of uncertainty. 

Communicating with stakeholders requires intention and practicality to succeed. Thus, you need to assess your communication and what you can do to ensure that your present and future communication will be effective and successful in targeting and engaging the right public audience. Especially given the current pandemic period and the need to reassess your communicative strategies for re-entry into both the workplace and the community. By incorporating proper communication methods into your organization's just practices, it will be more feasible to reach consistent and effective communication through messaging. Whether it be having to decide to rescale, reinvent, return, reduce, or retire your means and methods (Howard, 2021). Essentially, you need to assess your current communication position to be aware of possible changes, both now and later. 

So what will you do to properly assess the effectiveness of your communication? Whether it means evaluating the satisfaction and situations of employees or deciding what type of work model is best for your organization and work environment. What will you do to improve your communication, and how will you do it? Whether it be on an internal level, by having monthly team check-ins, one-on-one employee drop-ins, and workplace surveys? Or, on an external level, by asking your target audience for their feedback and preference, what they'd like to see in your organization's future? No matter the route you take, organizational leaders and CEOs need to ask themselves, "how do you know it will work"? What supports or adjustments will you put in place to ensure that you achieve the level of communication you're striving for?

Howard, C. (2021, January 27). Reset your business strategy in COVID-19 Recovery. Gartner. Retrieved September 21, 2021, from https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/reset-your-business-strategy-in-covid-19-recovery.