The best way for you to make a decision about what’s good for Josephine is to have all of the information about what’s going on at Josephine. The same is true for everyone else you work with, so it’s important that we’re all up to date about what’s happening, even with the areas of Josephine that we’re not actively involved with.
Transparency may seem like a passive process, like "don’t hide anything," but it’s actually a big challenge to keep everyone up to date and on the same page about stuff they’re not working on on a daily basis, even for a company the size of Josephine. These are some of the policies we use to make information more accessible, but our work is ongoing.
Everyone at Josephine writes their own Objectives and Key Results and they’re viewable by all employees in the OKRs folder. Any time you want to know what someone else is working on, or what their goals are for the next few months, you can check them out there.
OKRs are explicit, written priorities and intentions. These are what we think about every day and the ways we’re measuring our success, so they’re a good place to start when you want to know what someone is working on, or why they’re approaching a problem in a certain way.
Almost all Slack conversation should happen in public Slack channels where the rest of the team can see it. You may not subscribe to or pay attention to every channel, but conversations that happen in public channels are searchable and readable by the whole team, so when someone wants to know how we decided on some course of action, Slack gives them a place to look back at the conversation.
Not every ping or question needs to happen publicly, but when in question, you should err on the side of posting publicly. Currently about 50% of our conversations happen in public channels, which is a number we hope will keep growing.
Projects should have org-visible Trello boards so that everyone can see where a project is, and what’s being worked on at any point in time. These boards are a little more granular than OKRs and are more cross-organizational since they’re not specific to any individual person.
Work calendars should be shared to make scheduling meetings really easy and also to let the rest of the team see where we’re spending our time. Personal calendars often have sensitive information, and should be kept separate. Work calendars are documentation of how we’re budgeting our hours and are useful for the rest of the team.
When we measure something, it should be visible to everyone on the team. Our stats will be great sometimes and disappointing others, but when we hide or silo the hard stats, fewer people can help fix them. We’ll try to keep the most critical stats posted in the office, but any data that we’re collecting should be open to everyone.
Communication and negotiation among groups of people is difficult, but the more honest we can be with each other, the easier it will be for us to trust one another and work together as a team. Openness and honesty will be critical to our success, which is why our commitment to this principle is an continuous requirement.