Transparency in business has become a key topic of discussion — and we’re not referring to filling their offices with more windows than walls. With remote and hybrid work becoming increasingly common, startups and larger companies alike are now choosing to become more transparent about things like:
- Salaries
- Benefits
- Goals
- Budgets
- Company earnings
Creating a culture of trust and transparency is about aligning with your business’s ethics and values and using them as a north star to help guide day-to-day decision-making. That means sharing the successes and failures that drive the direction your business is heading.
Let’s dig into the benefits of transparency and business ethics and how they could impact your company.
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Try it free for 14 daysWhat is transparency in business?
Transparency in business means being honest and forthcoming with employees, customers, and stakeholders. Transparent business leaders disclose knowledge and company information so their team and customers can make informed decisions and keep shareholders informed.
For example, let’s say a rising tech company is on the verge of going public if they can string together a few solid quarters. By sharing this info with employees and even offering some equity, they can bolster the team to reach peak performance and reap the rewards. Everyone wins.
However, this example is a lofty one. To be a transparent business, you’ll need to start small. As the old saying goes, you have to give trust to get trust — that is the crux of business transparency.
While this concept can be difficult for leaders to accept, transparency has undeniable benefits.
The benefits of transparency in the workplace
If transparency is done in the right way, it can lead to several improvements like:
- Build your employee experience: In a study by Slack, 80% of employees said they want to learn more about how leaders make decisions in their organization. 87% want their future employers to be transparent.

- Boost profits: The Harvard Business Review found that high-trust companies are 2.5 times more likely to be high-performing revenue organizations than low-trust companies.
- Increase customer satisfaction: In 2016, Label Insight found that 94% of consumers prefer brands that practice transparency. That number has only increased in subsequent years, with 86% of Americans saying business transparency is more important than ever.
- Reduce employee turnover: According to SHRM, pay transparency decreases employee’s intention to quit by 30%.
But how do you do that? Here are a few ways you can start being more transparent with employees, clients, and other key stakeholders:
- Provide better clarity in job descriptions. Start from the source. Ensure job descriptions include salary expectations, benefits, job duties, and anything prospective candidates need. This will not only cut down the applicant pool and help you speed up your search, but it also shows that you’re fostering employee trust from the beginning.
- Share DEI updates and goals. Be open about your aspirations around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. More importantly, be open and honest about the current state and what initiatives you’re trying to reach these goals.
- Prioritize financial transparency. Look to technology to provide regular updates on the state of the company’s earnings, revenue breakdown, and financial goals. Transparency in this area helps build trust with employees, customers, and potential investors.
- Be clear on data collection and protection. Work with sensitive data or manage hybrid teams. You might benefit from employee monitoring software — but only if you’re transparent about how you use it, what data you collect, and how you protect your team.

Thankfully, there’s an easy place to start. Many companies move towards transparency by first publishing some of their private information. This can include things like:
- Public revenues
- Wages
- Hiring policies
- Diversity stats.
The list goes on and on, but typically, this information is published somewhere for the public to view. Sites like Baremetrics make this very easy, allowing you to automatically pull real-time data to a user-friendly dashboard.
Some businesses decide to take it a step further and publish employee salaries and the differences between team members. Companies can also create an easily accessible financial dashboard that illustrates the current state of the business.
Key strategies to foster transparency in a remote business
Now that you understand the benefits of fostering transparency and have seen some real-world examples, it’s time to take a look at some key strategies you can implore as a remote team.
Here are some ways you can create a culture of transparency for your remote business:
- Create open communication channels. Whether it’s Slack, email, or another tool from your tech stack, encourage transparency through regular check-ins and provide updates to keep your remote team on the same page.
- Share goals and performance metrics. How can you expect teams to reach their full potential if they don’t know what they’re working towards? OKRs, Goals, and other performance metrics are intended to be shared to better align team efforts with strategic objectives.
- Transparent time tracking and task management. Finding and implementing the right time tracking and task management tools is especially important for remote teams. Work to establish communication guidelines and lead by example to ensure others follow suit.
- Be open about the use of monitoring tools. 60% of remote teams are using monitoring software, but what percentage of those companies keep their employees in the loop? If you plan to use employee monitoring software, be vocal about what you’re going to track.
- Create Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Make sure you’re open about DEI policies and progress towards your goals there. Remote teams can reap the benefits of a wider, global talent pool, but only if they make strides to prioritize employee well-being.
As we briefly touched on before, there are several things you can do to become a more transparent company. Here is a list of things you could share with employees to help your business create transparency:
- Overall site visits
- Overall profit
- Number of total customers
- Number of new customers
- Net revenue
- Fees they’ve accrued
- Public revenues
- Wages
- Hiring policies
- Diversity stats
There are also many actions you can take as a business that can lead to more transparency, such as:
- Engage customers on social media
- Invite response from your customers on your product or service
- Make sure to have a good response time when it comes to answering customer’s queries.
- Build experiences or services that benefit your customers more than yourself and still reflect your company’s values.
- Don’t wait to dispense information.
Another great way to promote internal transparency is to utilize a few tools that allow everyone on your team to be on the same page.
Using a time tracking software like Hubstaff promotes transparency between clients, employers, and employees. This provides insight into how your team works, where time is spent, which projects are taking too much time, and how productive everyone is week to week.
Managers can see screenshots of work being done while team members log billable time and even see automatic GPS locations for on-the-go teams. You can track everyone’s activity levels and see how engaged each team member is. Hubstaff will even monitor which apps and websites they spend the most time on. Also, all this information is compiled into reports so you can see exactly what services you and your clients are paying for.
Because managers and clients get a clearer picture of the work being done, employees don’t have to spend time sending weekly email reports or justifying their time. Transparency in business means additional accountability and less wasted time clarifying what work is getting done.
Companies with integrity as a core value
To better explain how this can benefit your business, let’s take a look at an example of a company that does this really well: Whole Foods.

Whole Foods, as an organization, lives by six core values. They are according to their website:
- We Sell the Highest Quality Natural and Organic Foods
- We appreciate and celebrate great food.
- We Satisfy and Delight Our Customers
- Our customers are the lifeblood of our business and our most important stakeholders.
- We Promote Team Member Growth and Happiness
- Our business success is dependent upon the collective energy, intelligence, and contributions of all our Team Members.
- We Practice Win-Win Partnerships with Our Suppliers
- We are part of an interdependent business ecosystem.
- We Create Profits and Prosperity
- We earn profits every day through voluntary exchange with our customers.
- We Care About our Community and the Environment
As a business, Whole Foods chooses to let these six values be the basis of all their decision-making. If they’re considering adding a new line of products to any of their national locations, these products need to adhere to the company’s values. If they are looking to hire someone to join one of their teams, that person also needs to believe in what the organization stands for.
Their values are their guiding light, the thing that helps them decide what’s best for the company. This is why giving your business values is, for lack of a better word, valuable. They can usher consistency in your decision-making. They can provide you and your team with something to stand for.
If your company currently doesn’t have values that it tries to adhere to, consider looking back at your original business proposal. What was it that caused you or the founder to start the business?
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Then, consider what you want to accomplish. Not from an objective standpoint, but what your lofty, even ethereal, goals are. If you’re in the traffic cone manufacturing business, do you want to make the world a better place, one traffic cone at a time? Alternatively, if you run a small woodworking shop, do you want to support your local community of artists by crafting high-quality handmade goods?
Find that thing that makes your business unique. For Whole Foods, they summarize their values as “Our purpose is to nourish people and the planet.” This is the perfect example of integrity in a business: a place that truly wants to help and is doing its best to do so.
Just ask yourself what that is for you and your business, and go from there.
usiness means additional accountability and less wasted time clarifying what work is getting done.
Are there risks to being a transparent remote business?
We’ll be the first to admit that while there are undeniable benefits to increasing transparency at work, that doesn’t mean that transparency won’t have some drawbacks like:
- Too much transparency. You run the risk of overwhelming executives and hindering decision-making when too many people have access to information. Make sure you don’t overload employees with information and meetings on their calendars that they don’t need to be involved in.
- Communication gaps. With limited opportunities for face-to-face interactions, language barriers, and cultural differences, even transparent remote teams can experience miscommunications and other issues.
- Data privacy and security. The globalization of remote work has countless perks, but it does make security more challenging. Remote teams will need to balance transparency while still protecting sensitive information.
Example of a transparency risk
The Harvard Business Review cites an example where transparency didn’t work out.
“In a tragic example, at a Dutch energy supplier that used rigorous, transparent safety standards to deal with toxic waste, employees came to work one day to find the company’s safety officer dead of a workplace accident. It appeared he had violated the careful standards he himself had implemented. Rather than asking why or how this happened to a person with an almost perfect record of past behavior, the company focused on the facts instead of the reasons for those facts. This gave the impression that the safety officer was being blamed for what had happened. That, in turn, hurt morale and left employees feeling mistrustful.”
Of course, this is an extreme example, but it still makes a point to show that when there’s a lot of information to go from, and the data is what leads the narrative, people may not listen to anything else.
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Why we choose to be transparent
At Hubstaff, we’ve chosen to be a transparent company. We have made our numbers public, and we detail all of our successes and failures on our blog. We choose to make transparency important for several reasons, the most important being that we want to be honest with our customers.
As a company, Hubstaff believes in these core values: Transparency, Access, and Control.
These guiding principles define us as a company, but we also believe in:
- Prioritizing honesty
- Challenging others and ourselves
- Creativity, transparency, and accuracy.
- Supporting teams around the globe in any way we can
Transparency fosters trust. Sharing your company’s successes and failures helps you build a reputation with employees, customers, and stakeholders that you have their best interests at heart. When you genuinely value those that drive your success, the results will surely follow.
How do you define transparency in business? How have you adapted various company operations and culture to make a more transparent organization? We’d love to hear from you.
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