We’ve all been given the advice that honesty is the best policy at some point in our lives and surely this should be the case with managers and their staff? But it appears not, as many employees believe they are being kept in the dark about how the company is doing and fear that their bosses are playing power games, according to research by Geckoboard, the KPI dashboard specialist.
One in four employees are quitting their jobs over the lack of transparency and almost four in five say they don’t trust bosses who fail to share company data. A massive 80% want their boss to share more information with them but, without this information, up to 52% of employees are forced resort to doing their own detective work to discover what’s really going on.
This opaque approach to running a company, in which employees are intentionally kept in the dark about business developments, is referred to as ‘mushroom management’. But it is proving deeply unpopular with staff; the vast majority of employees believe that bad news is better than no news, with 93% saying they prefer that their bosses tell them bad news than leave them in the dark. And 50% of staff said that knowledge of company data would affect how much they contributed to the company’s overall performance.
Paul Joyce, CEO of Geckoboard, commented: “Without a clear view of the company position, how can we expect our employees to make the right decisions and perform against business KPIs to drive business growth? Ditching the style of mushroom management and instead adopting a clear, transparent data position with staff will not only boost morale but will help a business get the most out of its employees.”
Evidently the well-known idiom doesn’t hold anymore; for employees it’s no longer a case of no news is good news. 
