To improve efficiency and productivity in your business’s workplace, you must improve your transparency. You and your workers must be open with each other, and everybody must be willing to be held accountable for their actions. With this kind of transparency in place, critical particulars about your business will be available to you at all times. As a result, you will be able to make more informed decisions on what needs to be done to drive your organization forward.

To improve transparency within your business, you’re going to need to put the advice laid out below into practice.

Treat your employees with respect

Nothing is going to shut down the channels that you need to be open and transparent more than you being disrespectful to your employees. It’s quite simple — treat your employees with respect, and they will respect you enough to be open with you.

One way to treat your employees with respect is to treat them like the adults that they are, even if this means being a bit harsh with them from time to time. If they do something wrong, tell them. If you’re not happy with their work ethic, let them know. You cannot beat around the bush or sugarcoat the situation — your employees are adults, so don’t treat them like children. They will respect you for doing so in the long run, even if they aren’t necessarily happy with what you say to them at the time.

Explain every decision that you make

To keep your employees in the loop, you should seek to explain every choice that you make to ensure that they know your thinking behind the decisions that you come to. By doing this, you will open up a channel of communication with your employees that they will not expect to be open. They will appreciate this open channel nonetheless and, in return, feel more comfortable with regards to coming to you with their own work-related problems.

Make use of ERP software

Man-managing your employees is not the only thing you must do in your bid to improve transparency across the board in your business. You must also do your utmost best to ensure that critical information is available at all times so that nobody is ever left in the dark with regards to the work they are being asked to perform. Today, thanks to the rise of a multitude of different transparency-boosting technologies, this is achievable.

One type of tech that you should turn to in this instance is ERP software. As detailed over at Better Buys, by implementing this kind of system into your business operations, communication between your teams will increase tenfold. The result? Your services will be improved, and the need to sync transactions will be eliminated. By using this kind of system, you will get everybody in your business on the same page, no matter what department they work in.

When it comes to the matter of improving transparency in business, the above advice is essential.

Data integration helps with increasing transparency on multiple levels. For one, if you have multiple points of sale and data collection (online and offline), payment methods and invoicing, it may be hard for you to reconcile data from your ERP, e-commerce and marketplace at the end of the month, let alone in case of an internal audit. Here’s where an automated data integration software might be the right thing to choose. You’ll have all of your data in a single place, which will allow you to create better experiences for your customers and increase company-wide transparency.