How to Create Transparent and Accountable Teams With TimeBee

Transparency and accountability are key to running successful work teams. According to the University of Berkeley, team transparency is a phenomenon where information is shared openly, with everyone being honest about their milestones and challenges. Fostering an inclusive team atmosphere is vital for nurturing trust and unity among team members. 

Emphasizing team transparency means facilitating a system of open communication. This entails sharing relevant information, feedback, and expectations. At the same time, this flow must be two-way, welcoming and valuing various ideas and viewpoints.

While teams are part of every business setup, establishing trust and accountability may not be easy. 

Here’s how you can make your work teams more transparent and accountable:

Set Clear Goals

It’s always a good policy to start by spelling out the specifics of a team venture. When a team is set up, communicate the purpose and desired outcomes, as well as the expected level of performance by each team member. 

This can help them perform accordingly and align their expectations with yours rather than walking around on eggshells.

Describe Transparency & Accountability 

For many workers, words like transparency and accountability may carry stress-inducing connotations. When you communicate, you will keep things transparent and explain what you mean in practical terms. 

This means communicating what transparency practices you’ll implement and what benefits you want. At the same time, make sure you ask team members what transparency measures are the best. 

A great idea is to sit team members down for a discussion before a project starts. Ask them to share ideas on how they’ll hold each other accountable at various steps of the project. This way, they’ll be more at ease with being held accountable since they’re devising them. 

Provide Essential Information & Resources

Holding teams accountable shouldn’t mean you’re micromanaging their decisions. Rather, you should trust their talent and experience and encourage them to use both to realize organizational goals. 

Keeping team members guessing about important information is the opposite of transparency. When you create teams, make sure you share all essential information with them. Also, they should be empowered to use any required resources and make decisions regarding them.  

Knowing they’ll be held answerable for their use, workers are likely to be super-conscious of how they handle company resources and maximize their use of them. 

Model Transparency

You can model transparency by being candid and authentic about your challenges and struggles. Make sure your productivity dashboard and timesheets are visible to your team members, too.  Admit your mistakes, and ask for suggestions to improve your personal performance. Welcoming feedback for improvements can be insightful. 

If you’re a team leader, your attitude can determine that of your team members. Vulnerability and modesty can earn the trust of your coworkers and encourage them to reciprocate.

Celebrate Success and Learn from Failures

Acknowledge the accomplishments and contributions made by your team members, whether on an individual or collective basis. Show your gratitude and appreciation for their dedication and success. You may use monetary or non-monetary rewards to motivate your team. 

Additionally, study the team’s failures to extract valuable lessons. Engage in discussions to analyze what went wrong or could have been handled better. Finally, devise strategies with workers’ feedback to handle similar challenges in the future.

Use a Time Tracker

Your team’s transparency depends on how you’re going to monitor their work. Using an automated time tracker can offer numerous advantages. It effortlessly records the time of each worker without manual input. On top of it, the real-time data from tracking time offers valuable insights. 

As a best practice, we advise using an organizational dashboard that shows who is working on what and for how long at any given time. With such information, you uphold both accountability and transparency within the project. 

By tracking your time, you’ll be able to:

• Identify time-wasting activities and distractions
• Distinguish between high-achievers and free-riders
• Establish the amount of time to save and how to do it
• Estimate accurate project timelines with the data tracked

There are countless time-tracking tools available today.

Let’s discuss some of the standout features of TimeBee for better understanding.

Designed for Remote & On-site Teams

A smart time-tracking app must be designed with all kinds of team arrangements in mind. Team members must be able to track their time at home or in the office. 

Additionally, they can easily collaborate on projects and tasks by viewing project progress. 

Accurate Time Tracking

Automated timesheets should be initiated and stopped by users themselves. Having access to their daily and weekly productivity, team members may feel obliged to perform better against their previous stats.

Activity Reports

Viewing how individual workers spend their time gives you a transparent view of your team’s productivity. Sophisticated time trackers go one step further and classify time between productive and unproductive activities

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By knowing which workers need a gentle nudge in the right direction (maybe they need a break), you can help your team members snap out of productivity. 

Web & App Monitoring

If you’re a team lead, nothing would give you better access to your team members’ work day than their web & app usage reports. TimeBee categorizes workers’ time at work in terms of hours spent between apps and web pages. You can tell straight away how dedicated they are to work or if they’re trying to commit time theft.

Email Updates & Reports

As a team admin, you can receive regular reports on project progress and individual team member’s productivity through email updates. So, even if you’re off-site, you can monitor productivity and give timely feedback to team members. 

Spontaneous Employee Screenshots

Workers being aware that their timesheets may be tallied with periodic screenshots can be a powerful way of ensuring they’re not messing around at work. 

In addition, screenshots of employees’ devices provide proof of work and project progress, which can be presented to clients and during discussions of performance appraisal.  

Offline Tracking

Advanced tracking apps offer an offline tracking facility. So even if a team member loses internet connection, they can still record their progress through the tracker. If you have a hybrid team, you can keep track of a project’s progress without having all the team members online at the same time.

Chat Monitoring

To ensure transparency, chat monitoring feature can be used by team admins to ensure that all communication is ethical and within the work boundaries. Such accountability features are great for preventing any data leakages or information theft. 

Distraction Alerts

There can be several disruptions at work. Upon detecting idle activity, workers are issued distraction alerts that can help them get back on track. 

Benefits of Having Transparent Work Teams

Now that we have established how you can instill transparency in your teams, let’s go over some possible benefits you can garner from it:

Accountability Improves Performance

When put under a microscope, people perform better. Humans somehow manage to outperform themselves when they are held accountable for the results- according to the Hawthorne Effect. 

For example, people going to gyms every day are often more conscious of their progress than those working out at home. That is because they’re aware of being watched by their gym fellows, expecting to notice results. 

In a team setting, you cannot hide your failures. Your performance and professionalism are visible to your teammates. This gives people all the more reason to go the extra mile to impress others. Similarly, being monitored by your supervisor or automated monitoring tools can also encourage you to make intelligent choices at work rather than wasting company time or being reckless at work. 

Easier to Prioritize work

Transparency means keeping everyone in the loop and giving them access to essential resources. 

Since all relevant information is shared with teams, they can easily prioritize tasks before they start the actual work. This may help them design a logical workflow, keeping a margin for any predictable changes. 

Access to team members’ timesheets and schedules can also improve how workers are managed. For example, you can give a break to workers who risk burning out, and replace them with those who are still under their weekly hours target. This translates to smart resource utilization. 

Get Honest Feedback

Honesty is the root of transparency. When honest and clean feedback is encouraged in teams, people are encouraged to speak their minds instead of condoning mediocre work. 

When teams are accountable for their collective output, they don’t hold back on sharing improvement ideas and accepting mistakes. This no-nonsense attitude is crucial for an organization to challenge itself to make consistent improvements. 

Accountability Prevents Team Animosity

At some point, disagreements between coworkers are inevitable. But when a team is held accountable for its common goal, such arguments turn into constructive discussions that lead to better outcomes.  

Encouraging team members to be transparent about their strengths and weaknesses can foster mutual trust and respect. Instead of competing with each other, they’d be inclined to share the burden and seek advice. 

Collaboration Expedites Progress

Working in teams often proves to garner faster results than working solo. 

Why? Not only do you have team members to share workload with, but also because you’re answerable for the team’s performance. Knowing the output is a collective effort yet reflects on your individual talent, workers may be geared to take the initiative. 

So rather than minding only their own tasks, team members are on the lookout for helping each other to crush those deadlines and goals. 

In Summary

Transparency in the workplace is a valuable trait that provides employees solid reasons to remain loyal to your organization. Nevertheless, it should be implemented with a mindset of responsibility to maintain balance. 

Additionally, transparency is a value that should be prevalent throughout the hierarchy. Demanding work accountability by a particular hierarchical level can not only come across as rude but also unethical. 

Today, we are fortunate enough to live in a time when every aspect of administration can be automated. Incorporating smart time tracking can be a pillar of accountability and transparency in your team. It is a specialized tool that can relieve you of administrative burdens while providing powerful insights to improve your team’s performance. 

Please share any other underrated transparency measures that have worked for you!