We are working a lot with trust and transparency in my current team. Specifically on the transparency item one “trick” we have been using is to cc the entire team in as many conversations as possible.
I picked this practice up from the Stripe company and specifically this article, which is a great read if you haven’t seen it before.
Yes, they cc the whole company on everything. And I’ve seen this practice in action at Spotify to certain extent as well.
By now some of you need oxygen; MY GOD! My inbox will be flooded. And how could anyone be expected to read all of that?! Do these people do any real work?
There’s three comments that needs to be made here, that I have repeated a lot when trying to implement this in all kinds of teams;
First; you are not expected to read or act on this. CC stands for Carbon (moahahaha!) Copy and simply means that you get a copy. I’d suggest you train the rest of your organisation in how to properly us this and DO not answer to emails that you are CC on, only to the ones sent TO you.
Secondly (related to the first); get good at using the email tool and help others to become better too. I have a very simple rule that takes everything that I am cc-ed on and just put it in a separate folder; “Inbox - CC”. I read that when I have time over.
Thirdly (and most important): there’s a symbolic value in sharing the information with everyone. We trust each other to let everyone in on all the things. We trust each other to act wisely with that information. We believe that more minds are better than fewer and strive to become more and more transparent with our information.
Summary
The main idea here is not that everyone knows everything all the time, but you already have that information at your finger tips. You can just find it in your email. It’s already there!
We don’t expect you to act on everything - but you are encourage to take part and offer your opinion in matters that are important and interesting to you.
This is where we trying to go. CC all the things!
You already have that information. We share everything