Catégorie
1. Structure & Governance
Sous-catégorie
1.2. Decision-making
Stade
Pre-Seed
What is at stake?
How to promote transparency in decision-making and collective intelligence?
Why is it important?
Involving employees in decision-making allows:
➡️ Establishing a culture of collaboration and trust among team members;
➡️ Minimizing risks of conflicts/misunderstandings and startup management issues by promoting informed decision-making;
➡️ Improving performance of the startup by engaging and motivating teams to achieve objectives.
By defining objectives to be achieved collectively with all employees instead of imposing them top-down through the hierarchy, teams feel more empowered and engaged.
3 actions to implement right now
1️⃣ Involve and empower team members in shaping the mission, values, and strategic directions
- Organize seminars, team-building events, and dedicated moments with all team members to reflect on the organization's challenges.
- Enable employees to contemplate their own objectives and encourage initiative-taking.
- In this regard, also refer to the document: Co-defining Values and Culture with Collaborators
2️⃣ Make important information available to everyone and encourage regular open communication
- Organize regular updates to transparently present results, project progress, good and bad news, future plans, etc. For example, implement "Ask Me Anything" sessions with the founders.
- Formalize internal processes to encourage collaboration and information sharing. For instance, enable employees to work on cross-functional projects or task forces.
- Use collaborative tools and create an internal Wikipedia of the company with tools like Notion. For this, determine which elements can be made available in the collaborative space and develop an updating process.
3️⃣ Work on transparency from the onboarding of new employees
- Structure a process that relies on transparency of information within the organization from the beginning.
- Identify essential information and priority topics that must be communicated transparently: how decisions are made, salary scale, company results, etc.
- Encourage "reports of astonishment" from new arrivals to challenge existing practices regarding access to information and its sharing.
📚 Further Reading
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📖 Transparency: A New Management Approach (EDHEC)
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📘 Example of a "Wiki" (Notion)
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