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Transparency - The Transparency Trap - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
Transparency -
The Transparency Trap - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
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Author:His Magnificence the Crown, Kabiesi Ebo Afin! Oloja Elejio Oba Olofin Pele Joshua Obasa De Medici Osangangan Broadaylight.
Summary.
To promote accountability, productivity, and shared learning, many organizations create open work environments and gather reams of data on how individuals spend their time. A few years ago, HBS professor Ethan Bernstein set out to find empirical evidence that such approaches improve organizational performance. What he discovered is that this kind of transparency often has an unintended consequence: It can leave employees feeling vulnerable and exposed. When that happens, they conceal any conduct that deviates from the norm so that they won’t have to explain it. Unrehearsed, experimental behaviors sometimes stop altogether.
But Bernstein also discovered organizations that had established zones of privacy within open environments by setting four types of boundaries: around teams, between feedback and evaluation, between decision rights and improvement rights, and around periods of experimentation. Moreover, across several studies, the companies that had done all this were the ones that consistently got the most creative, efficient, and thoughtful work from their employees.
Bernstein’s conclusion? By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can capture the benefits of both, and encourage just the right amount of “positive deviance” needed to increase innovation and productivity.
“Transparency” is a watchword in management these days, and it’s easy to understand why. After all, if people conduct their work in plain view, won’t they be more open and accountable? Won’t they flag and fix problems more easily, and share information and their good ideas more freely?
That’s
certainly what I expected to discover a few years ago, when I went in
search of empirical evidence that transparency improves performance in
organizations. But through rigorous field research and experiments, and
observations by embedded researchers, I learned that it’s not that
simple. My findings, which complement various studies on open workspaces (see “Balancing ‘We’ and ‘Me’” in this issue), suggest that more-transparent environments are not always better. Privacy is just as essential for performance.
Here’s
the paradox: For all that transparency does to drive out wasteful
practices and promote collaboration and shared learning, too much of it
can trigger distortions of fact and counterproductive inhibitions.
Unrehearsed, experimental behaviors sometimes cease altogether.
Wide-open workspaces and copious real-time data on how individuals spend
their time can leave employees feeling exposed and vulnerable. Being
observed changes their conduct. They start going to great lengths to
keep what they’re doing under wraps, even if they have nothing bad to
hide. If executives pick up on signs of covert activity, they
instinctively start to monitor employee behavior even more intensely.
And that just aggravates the problem.
If
all this seems vaguely Orwellian, so did some of the activities I saw
in leading companies where intense visibility and tracking were making
things worse, not better. For instance, at one of the world’s largest
mobile phone factories, which is in China and is owned by a global
contract manufacturer, the workers on one line were hiding process improvements
they had made—not just from managers but from their peers on other
lines. Why? Because, as one experienced worker explained, “it’s most
efficient to hide it now and discuss it later. Everyone is happy: They
see what they expect to see, and we meet our targets.”
This
was not an isolated example. In my research, I found that individuals
and groups routinely wasted significant resources in an effort to
conceal beneficial activities, because they believed that bosses, peers,
and external observers who might see them would have “no idea” how to
“properly understand” them. Even when everyone involved had only the
best of intentions, being observed distorted behavior instead of
improving it.
Some
organizations, however, had found the sweet spot between privacy and
transparency, getting the benefits of both. They used four types of
boundaries to establish certain zones of privacy within open
environments: They created boundaries around individual teams—zones of
attention—to avoid exposing every little action to the scrutiny of a
crowd. They drew boundaries between feedback and evaluation—delineating
zones of judgment—to avoid politicking and efforts wasted on managing
impressions. They set boundaries between decision rights and improvement
rights—establishing zones of slack—to avoid driving out tinkering. And
they put boundaries around carefully defined periods of
experimentation—zones of time—to avoid both too frequent and too
infrequent interruptions. Across several studies involving different
industries, cultures, and types of work, the companies that had done all
this were the ones that consistently got the most innovative,
productive, and thoughtful work from their employees.
VIDEO: Ethan Bernstein explains how to create productive zones of privacy.
...
Type 1: Boundaries Around Teams
As
social media platforms, wearable devices, and other tools for
transparency become more advanced, our sense of being “onstage” is
growing. And so, in keeping with the sociologist Erving Goffman’s
insights about interpersonal behavior, we spend more time acting,
trying to control others’ impressions and avoid
embarrassment—particularly at work. We cater to our audience, doing
what’s expected.
That
was the case at the Chinese mobile phone factory, which had 14,000
workers. When I began studying that work environment, it seemed like the
epitome of transparency: Each floor—roughly the size of a football
field, with no walls or other divisions—held as many as 2,000 workers
across shifts.
By
embedding into the lines five Chinese-born Harvard undergraduate
researchers—who worked, ate, and lived alongside the employees, who knew
them only as coworkers—I quickly learned that the production teams hid a
great deal from observers, despite the open environment. For example,
to speed up assembly, workers scanned multiple bar codes into the system
at once instead of scanning each one individually after applying it to a
metal shield in a phone, as standard operating procedure required. And
team members cross-trained on tasks during downtime—it looked like
fooling around from the outside—so they could cover for one another when
an operator fell behind. There was no ill intent—only a rational
calculation about how to be most productive without having to waste time
on explanations.
Such
subterfuge is problematic for a host of reasons, though, ranging from
increased risk of compliance-related defects to a lack of shared
learning. To test some basic interventions that might address it, I set
up a few field experiments. On one floor, where 32 production lines made
similar mobile data cards, I randomly selected four lines on which to
experiment, leaving 28 “controls” to work as they always had.
Because
one of the experimental lines was very close to a control line,
engineering put up a curtain between the two. When it was raised, one of
the embedded students overheard a worker say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if
they hung up curtains all around the line, so we could be completely
closed off? We could be so much more productive if they did that.”
Curious to see if that would be true, I asked engineering to fully
encircle each experimental line with the equivalent of a hospital bed
curtain. Over the next five months, to my surprise, the lines with
curtains were 10% to 15% more productive than the rest, even when I
controlled for other influences (such as the Hawthorne effect, whereby
subjects improve simply in response to being studied).
By
shielding employees from observation, the curtains supported local
problem solving, experimentation, and focus. But within the curtains
work became much more transparent. Partly for that reason, defects
remained extremely low, even as throughput rose. And over time the
camaraderie within boundaries made the workers more likely to share—as a
group—their privately worked-out solutions with other lines.
Selective Screening
When curtains went up around manufacturing lines at a Chinese factory, so did productivity. Lines that were ...
Traditionally,
people in organizations expect full transparency within teams but not
necessarily beyond them. Team boundaries can allow for productive,
selective opacities within starkly transparent environments—as was clear
at Valve Software,
a top PC game developer I studied with Francesca Gino and Bradley
Staats. Valve’s 400-plus employees are allowed to allocate 100% of their
time to projects they feel are valuable to customers. When they
collaborate on new products or features, they form teams called cabals
and move their desks (which are set on wheels) together into clusters.
The office layout is so fluid, with some individuals rolling their desks
to different cabals multiple times a week, that Valve even has an
internal application to track desk location.
Valve’s
cabals choose their own workspaces, creating privacy by positioning
themselves at a distance from others. Though transparency is high within
them, it’s moderate at best across the company because of the physical
separation and Valve’s distaste for managerial oversight. (No one has
the role of keeping tabs on the cabals or shuttling information back and
forth.) This gives the cabals more freedom to investigate ideas.
When
one employee started a cabal to explore how Valve could get into
hardware, the team was initially tiny. Had it immediately tried to rally
the support of the entire organization of software engineers, the
hardware concept might have been dead on arrival—it’s hard to persuade
lots of people at once to embrace anything new, even at Valve. But
acquiring a few followers with whom to experiment and create prototypes
was doable. Gradually, the hardware cabal accreted people and resources,
gaining scale and momentum. To recruit more people to join it, early
members eventually had to tell others what they were up to. In other
words, they increased their transparency outside the group—but in their
own way and when they were ready.
We’ve
seen it happen with curtains, counters, and cabals: Even nominal team
boundaries relieve the pressure of being onstage by keeping the audience
small.
Is
Valve providing an innovative, productive work environment? Its success
suggests that it is. In its 18-year existence, Valve has produced a
large share of top PC games. According to its founder, Valve has grown
sales by more than 50% every year and brought in more revenue per
employee than Apple or Microsoft. Its game platform consumes more
bandwidth than most countries do. The cabals help the company compete in
a market where creativity and rapid prototype and launch capabilities
are critical.
Though
Valve is an extreme case (and its success is a product of many
factors), other firms are similarly fostering innovation and
productivity by allowing privacy within team boundaries. For instance,
Google doesn’t track when and where its engineers spend the 20% of their
time that they devote to projects that interest them personally—but
they feel transparently accountable to others within
the self-organized teams in which the work gets done. And that
protected 20% time has been credited with the incubation of more than
half of Google’s current product portfolio, including Gmail, AdSense,
Google Talk, Google News, Google Transit, Google Now, and the Google
Transparency Report.
Team boundaries have a big impact on performance for service providers as well. In a recent Harvard Business School study,
Melissa Valentine and Amy Edmondson show how such boundaries (in their
case, counters delimiting small and very fluid groupings of nurses and
physicians) improved teamwork and efficiency in a hospital’s emergency
department. Transparency and accountability among people working within
the boundaries increased. As a result, average patient time in the
department fell by more than 40%, with no decrease in quality.
Remarkably, the department sustained that improvement for over a year
(the length of the study) even though its daily patient volume rose by
more than 25%.
Although
tools for observation (see the sidebar “Tracking Every Move”) and
collaboration have become more powerful, making it easier for
individuals to do much of their work without formal teams to support
them, teams are actually proliferating rather than dying off.
Longitudinal surveys show that today nearly all Fortune
1000 firms have formal team structures, compared with fewer than 20% in
1980. Though a number of factors are driving that trend, my research
suggests it has something to do with the value of boundaries. Workers
today can tackle problems in cooperation with large networks—and even
crowds—of people, but as teams scholar Richard Hackman
demonstrated, they frequently do it better on clearly bounded teams.
Boundaries create a focus on “us” and “our work together,” liberated
from external noise, whether it’s unproductive interference or chaotic
workflow. No matter what the work is, some observers will increase
productivity, but others will undermine it. Whether boundaries are
spatial or psychological, they can limit observation to a zone of
people. It happens with curtains, cabals, counters—even nominal team
boundaries mitigate the pressures of being onstage by keeping the
audience small.
Tracking Every Move
Many of the same companies that led the digital transformation of industries are also leading the digital ...
Type 2: Boundaries Between Feedback and Evaluation
Organizations
are incorporating more and more real-time data—all those electronic
bread crumbs we leave behind as we do our work—into performance
assessments. In response, employees waste a lot of valuable energy
managing impressions. But tools that separate data-informed feedback
from the evaluation process help lower people’s defenses and put the
focus squarely on productivity and problem solving, where you want it.
In
general, any information that goes into a formal performance review
tends to put people on edge. Nevertheless, most employees are keenly
interested in improving their skills. Just look at the popularity of
Rypple, a social media platform created to allow members of
organizations to give and gather anonymous feedback. (Salesforce.com
purchased Rypple within three years of its launch for $60 million. It’s
now called Work.com.) “You simply had to ask, ‘How am I doing at X?’”
explains Rypple cofounder Daniel Debow, “and the answers were purely for
you.” Because only the recipients had access to their feedback, fear of
repercussions was removed from the equation. Further, Debow notes,
those giving the feedback submitted honest, useful appraisals—with
assurance of privacy, they didn’t have to worry that candid criticism
might damage colleagues’ reputations.
Another
way of allowing employees to learn from their day-to-day actions
without having every little mistake exposed to management is to deliver
feedback within a protective bubble. A large U.S. trucking company did
this when it installed a DriveCam at the top of each tractor cab’s
windshield to improve driver safety and performance. The small video
camera points both outside and at the driver, gathering and wirelessly
transmitting data that analysts can use to flag risky behaviors and
prevent accidents. A green light tells the driver that all is well. But
during a “G-force event” (any erratic driving incident that causes
gravitational force, such as excessive speeding, slamming of brakes, or
sudden swerving), the light blinks red and green. If the force is strong
enough, the light turns red and the camera stores footage from eight
seconds before and four seconds after the event. (On average, each
vehicle’s DriveCam stores about five minutes’ worth of video a month.)
The DriveCam also records key metrics, like the truck’s speed and
location.
A
small group of coaches who oversee fleet safety review any events
deemed preventable. Only in a situation involving damage or a willful
breaking of the law—for instance, failing to use a seat belt or texting
while driving—would the coaches share footage with management. And the
supervisors who evaluate the truckers aren’t privy to the coaching.
When
the DriveCams were installed, drivers initially dreaded “being watched
by Big Brother.” Some got distracted when the red light came on, which
made safety worse. But drivers have since warmed to the cams, because
they now trust that management won’t use the videos to evaluate or
reprimand them. As one coach explains, the collaboration is helping
drivers “turn bad habits into good habits” and improving their safety
record. When coaches look at the footage with drivers, “it really does
help,” another says. “It changes people’s perspectives.” Sometimes it’s
just a simple realization: “Wow, you know, I was following a little too
closely.”
Feedback Without Fear
At one trucking company, video cameras show drivers (but not their managers) how they can improve.
Photography: ...
Type 3: Boundaries Between Decision Rights and Improvement Rights
Managers work hard to clarify decision rights,
and for good reason. Spelling out who gets to make which calls helps
organizations run more smoothly. It prevents duplicated effort, for
example, and decision gridlock. But the empowerment of a select few can
leave the other people in the organization feeling voiceless, especially
if they aren’t explicitly invited to improve systems, processes, roles,
and tasks. Employees may withhold their ideas or implement them on the
sly. When organizations don’t grant improvement rights to those without
decision rights, innovation by those who see solutions where others
don’t—known as productive, or positive, deviance—is effectively squashed in favor of conformity and compliance.
It’s
important to draw a line between the two kinds of rights, because the
people exercising them have different needs. Holders of decision rights
benefit from a transparent environment, where “every small fact becomes
the subject of careful, scientific investigation,” as Frederick Winslow
Taylor put it more than a century ago. But while holders of decision
rights want perfect visibility, which requires transparency from
everyone, that kind of visibility gets in the way of employees’ striving
to make things better, because it curtails the experimentation
necessary for improvements, as seen in the mobile phone factory and
other settings.
In
fact, a long stream of research tells us that in the presence of
others, people do better on repetitive, practiced tasks—what
psychologists call dominant responses—but worse on learning tasks that
call for creative thinking. The visibility created by transparency
conjures up self-consciousness and inhibitions. That’s why musicians
perform in front of an audience but practice without one—they need
privacy to noodle and make discoveries. So, the right level of
transparency—and thus oversight—depends on the activity and the
observer. While musicians may practice in front of a teacher, that
teacher is an invited coach, not a consumer of their work. Technology is
making close scrutiny by large audiences of consumers possible to a
degree that Taylor could never have imagined, and clear decision rights
amplify its effects. If you’re under the spotlight in front of such an
audience, the last thing you want to do is to make unpracticed
improvements while being held to a performance standard. All that
transparency can create yearning for a closed door with a sign that
says, “I’m in rehearsal!”
Organizations
that understand all this are giving employees a reprieve from total
transparency in order to make “slack” (excess resources) more productive
rather than more scarce. Take Flextronics, a company that Willy Shih,
Nina Bilimoria Angelo, and I have studied. By setting up a “moonshine
shop,” Flextronics has turned its factory floor in Guadalajara into a
veritable Legoland for workers. The shop gives employees a place to
develop tools and fixtures for their lines in periods of
downtime—creative work that imparts a sense of ownership. (Manufacturing
companies often facilitate improvement rights in this way.) Made of
simple pipes, connectors, and recycled materials, the designs produced
in the shop can cost a tenth of what it takes to produce the more
complex, specially sourced fixtures provided by vendors. The quality
makes IKEA look high-end, but the designs do the job efficiently,
safely, and effectively. More important, the shop encourages continual
innovation by the operators, creating efficiencies that would otherwise
remain in the imagination of workers.
Productive Slack
In the “moonshine shop” at Flextronics, workers—who are encouraged to tinker with simple pipes, connectors, and ...
Manufacturers
aren’t the only organizations that have made slack more productive by
protecting improvement rights. Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley Staats, and I
saw this happen at the U.S. retailer Belk when it upgraded a mostly
manual labor-scheduling system for its 24,000 employees and 300-plus
department stores. Belk could have followed the lead of large retailers
that have automated nearly all the scheduling task, increasing the
efficiency of labor with complex algorithms based on minute-by-minute
sales figures, real-time weather predictions, activity-based time
studies, and other data. But Belk wanted to give its store managers and
schedulers the flexibility to account for staffing variations and other
local factors, since retail labor is a key driver of customer
experience—and, therefore, sales. So its managers chose the simplest
form of the technology and allowed local store managers and schedulers
to exercise judgment, revising the schedules proposed by the system
without having to seek corporate-level approval.
In
the early days they revised more than 70% of the scheduling. Now that
rate is below 50%—a more efficient, productive range. And while at least
one of Belk’s competitors recently suffered well-publicized challenges
in getting a return on its new fully automated scheduling system, Belk’s
pilot stores showed a 2% lift in gross profit by the end of 2013,
several months after implementing the version that allowed for
overrides.
Which
employees should be given improvement rights in order to create
productive zones of slack? That depends on the organization and its
leadership. In a lean environment everyone may be responsible for
improvement. But other companies might treat it as an opportunity, not a
mandate, perhaps vesting improvement rights in an R&D unit, a
heavyweight team of senior managers, or frontline workers. Or an
organization might outsource improvements to suppliers, contractors, or
consultants. In any case, the assignment of improvement rights both
reflects and influences strategy, so leaders must protect them by
putting skunkworks activities inside zones of privacy.
Type 4: Boundaries Around Time
Another
way to strike the right balance between transparency and privacy is to
experiment within limited blocks of time. With this approach, executives
give employees more freedom for a specified period, so people can
prepare for—and make the most of—their window of privacy.
This
type of boundary complements the other three. A company might set up
temporary teams for idea gestation, provide a onetime stream of
developmental feedback (such as a 360-degree evaluation) that won’t make
its way into performance reviews, or assign improvement rights to a
certain group for a quarter. Some biotech and consulting firms have
borrowed the concept of the sabbatical from education and offered
employees periods of relatively opaque slack. Googlers often use their
20% time on Fridays.
Tony
Lo, the CEO of Giant Bicycles, granted CFO Bonnie Tu time-limited
decision-making authority when he asked her to develop a business model
to better meet female customers’ needs. Lo saw Tu as a perfect leader
for this initiative: Her seniority, reputation, and financial acumen
gave her the freedom to break the usual rules. Lo—who was used to
checking on important projects monthly, weekly, or even daily—left Tu
alone for six months, the amount of time he thought it should take to
develop and launch the idea. Tu and her team delivered brilliantly: They
created a store in Taipei for women only—which reached profitability
faster than any other Giant store. It has spawned a number of innovative
products and serves as a model for similar stores around the globe.
In
the same spirit, several major retailers have supplemented corporate
planograms with “flexograms,” enabling individual store managers to
change how and where they display products in response to customer
behavior. While some retailers, like H&M, have made flexograms a
standard practice, most limit them to times of year when local
customization and ingenuity are likely to maximize sales. They
frequently allow experimentation during the December holiday season, for
example. CVS put its sun care displays on wheels so that store managers
could easily reposition them to take advantage of fast-changing weather
and buying trends at specified times during key periods in the summer.Sir Alex Ferguson,
the former manager of the Manchester United football club, who is
widely believed to be one of the greatest coaches in history, had an
interesting take on transparency and its effects on performance. Though
he championed the use of vests fitted with GPS sensors, which allowed
analysis just 20 minutes after a training session, he said he would
“never criticize a player during a training session. That’s where they
try the irreverent things that will, and won’t, work during a match.”
It’s
an important point: Irreverence increases our willingness to test how
we do things and to deviate from the norm. But total transparency
heightens the risk that our irreverence will come back to haunt us—and
thus has a chilling effect on experimentation. Advanced sensing and
tracking technologies make behavior highly visible in real time. How all
that information should be used—by individuals, their teams, their
supervisors—is a management question, not a technology question.
Organizational cultures that foster psychological safety, trust,
balanced power dynamics, and collaboration can help. But it’s also
critical for leaders to mitigate transparency with zones of privacy,
enabling just the right amount of deviance to foster innovation and
productivity.
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