KDPaine's PR Measurement Blog

10 Steps to Corporate Transparency

Deborah Hyman, Director of Global Communications at Verizon has a great list of 10 steps to Corporate Transparency:

1. 1 Set and define corporate targets for transparency
2. 2 Engage your stakeholders, employees, communities etc.
3. Monitor your environment
4. Post your corp governance polices on your web site
5. Form an internal transparency and ethics committee
6. Require ethics training and commitment from employees to uphold business principles
7. Localize public issues with employees and enlist help of third parties and local officials
8. Be willing to disclose all of your business social and political activities
9. Address the tough question directly and speak candidly with employees
10. Conduct a culture audit

She believes that the Role of PR in Transparency is three fold:

1. Integrate your external engagement strategies into the culture
2. Champion the concept of openness
3. Be willing to open yourself up to scrutiny

 

The fable of the King and the Shiny New Objects.

Once upon a time there was a shiny new object called the telephone, and the first person to manage the telephone in an organization was the King. Eventually sales and customer service and marketing and everyone else were clamoring for this shiny new object and the king was very scared. He worried about who would control communications and manage the function and he feared that it all would become too fragmented. But eventually everyone had a telephone and we forgot what the fuss was about.

A few decades later there was another shiny new object called the computer. And originally the King managed all things having to do with the computer. And then sales and marketing and customer service and all the different divisions who needed business intelligence started clamoring for computers. And the King was very scared. He worried about who would control the proliferation of all these new objects and who would decide who would or would not have access to these new-fangled computer things. A few years later everyone in the company was on line, using computers to facilitate work flow, manufacturing, customer service, sales, HR and marketing and we forgot what the fuss was about.

Another decade or so later there was a shiny object called social media. And now the king was really really afraid. Who would control these uncontrolled conversations, and who and how would we manage our messages, he fretted. Thousands of words were written, lots of blood was shed, and whole division heads were beheaded. But eventually, everyone realized that it was a good thing that everyone in the company could listen to what the market had to say and actually carry on conversations with customers and prospects and potential employees. And eventually we forgot what the fuss was all about.