63% of Employees Become Strong Advocates When Leaders are Transparent

by Pamela Coleman

July 2026

Transparency is more than a corporate buzzword. Organizations thrive when leaders clearly articulate their challenges and goals. A study cited in O.C. Tanner's 2026 Global Culture Report shows that 63% of employees become strong corporate advocates when you embrace openness and clarity about business operations, compared with a shocking 6% in companies that are not transparent. 

Many approaches to strategic planning are grounded in the principle that more knowledge of an organization's goals brings more people into alignment with its overarching direction, resulting in more engagement, improved performance, and better outcomes. Transparency is not only about clearly revealing business strategy and goals. This concept also applies to an organization’s operating code - the heart of its cultural planning. 

Zappos notably built a culture of transparency by creating a vendor extranet and internal databases that allowed employees to view every transaction, budget, expense, and documentation for individual roles and team projects - ensuring employees and business partners stayed aligned and reducing resource drain caused by disengagement. Clarity – whether in the form of fully transparent operating processes or cultural frameworks that provide employees insight into the HOW of organizational operations – removes distraction from an organization and helps keep the entire team aligned.

However, many organizations still get transparency wrong, confusing it with "selective openness" by sharing only the wins while sweeping challenges under the corporate rug, undermining accountability. Frameworks support accountability, whether addressing strategy or culture, and answer both “why are we recognizing” and “why do we need to change.” What drives employees’ success drives business success. 

During the global COVID pandemic, my organization embraced a deeply transparent approach. We published a daily newsletter to keep our employees fully aware of what we knew as leaders and how we were interpreting that into our policy. This transparency reinforced a cultural operating code we had constructed, grounded in both information-sharing and empathy. Obviously, nothing was perfect during that stressful time, but we managed an essential business, avoided serious health outcomes, and remained profitable. Our leadership team puts into practice the heart of our cultural framework.

Cultural transparency reinforces another critical aspect of any business operation: decision-making. Your cultural framework shapes every decision, and a coherent cultural framework informs ALL employees on how to make their own decisions – from the tech room to the production floor to the project planning meeting.  The 2026 Global Culture Report also points out that a lack of transparent decision-making leads to employee frustration, mistrust, and a decline in morale, which can ripple across workplace culture.

Your employees are either becoming advocates or quietly disengaging. Which is it — and does your cultural framework give them a reason to choose the former? The Cultural Coherence Model can help you find out. The book is available on Amazon, or visit the Cultural Coherence website to find out more.