How to Foster a Culture of Accountability Among Employees
According to Philip Turvey, the Executive Director of Anglia Research, it's essential to engage your workforce and sustain your staff’s well-being by fostering a culture of accountability. He says this is especially true in the new normal where companies are forced to adopt remote work practices.
In this article, we’ll explore how to increase accountability in the workplace, so you can attain both success and satisfaction in your line of work.
We can also teach you a thing or two on how to measure accountability in the workplace so you can determine whether you’re on the right path toward creating an accountable working environment.
1. Onboard project management software
Adding project management software to your tech roster is a superb way to increase accountability and ownership in the workplace. The software can help you clearly define shared expectations, monitor milestones, collaborate with your staff, and measure team performance.
With the right tools, promoting accountability in the workplace can be a piece of cake. And if you’re looking for the best software solution, there’s no need to look further.
Rodeo is the all-in-one work operating system that organizes projects and makes running a successful business a little easier. It cuts out the distractions, so the team can focus on the real work.
With Rodeo, you get instant real-time insight into the status and budgets of your projects. Its easy and accurate cross-platform time tracking tool makes complaints about 'stupid timesheets' vanish into thin air. It lets you draw your estimates straight from your budget and planning.
You can assign tasks and lock in resources with just a few clicks. Rodeo accounts for every second, linking with your account software to prepare your invoice and sending it out automatically.
2. Practice time tracking
If you want to know how to measure accountability in the workplace, you have to consider looking at your staff’s productivity levels. When you begin monitoring your staff’s working hours, you can easily appraise how your workers make the most of their time. With this, you stay on top of productivity margins and finish projects in an accurate and timely manner since you already know how long it should take to do so.
On the other hand, team members who aren’t working as hard as other staff can be held accountable for their inactivity. Even remote workers can be put on the clock through time tracking software or a project management platform with time tracking features. Missed deadlines can be discussed openly with recorded proof on the productivity line.
The actual amount of work becomes transparent, and everyone in your pipeline can benefit from this practice.
Related: 15 Best Time Tracking Software for Project Management
3. Gain ownership insights through reports
Comprehensive reports enable managers to determine whether promises are delivered, and work is done. Regardless of the industry you work in. It’s important to look at reports and ensure they’re both timely and straightforward so you can use them to raise accountability and ownership in the workplace.
Since we’ve already glossed over Rodeo’s powerful capabilities, we can drop one more advantage our software provides that you can use to promote accountability in the workplace.
Our platform can provide insights on team productivity, costs of projects in progress, and even the performance of previous projects, according to registered hours as opposed to allotted hours.
For instance, you’d like to check which members of your staff are slacking. You can just whip out a productivity report from our software and monitor how efficient your workers are during a particular period according to their availability.
Meanwhile, since your staff knows their working hours are being calculated and tracked, they’ll make a conscious effort to work harder and answer for their actions if they fail to do so.
4. Promote accountability in the workplace
As a leader or project manager, you decide who you work with and how to handle your team best. However, this doesn’t equate to kicking out those who aren’t team players regarding accountability and ownership.
You need to trust your workforce and encourage them to trust each other too. By doing so, you’re building a culture of accountability across your enterprise that eventually yields long-term, relentless success.
Accountability is a factor that keeps employees highly engaged, with data showing that company cultures with high engagement witness a 21% higher revenue from their operations.
Related: Team Accountability: How To Hold Your Team Accountable
5. Seek advice
We recognize that sometimes fostering accountability and ownership in the workplace can be difficult to deal with alone. It’s about the last thing on your mind with other heavy tasks such as creating realistic budgets.
That’s why you can approach project management experts or take accountability courses. You can also invest in team-building activities to strengthen the bonds between your staff.
Some project management software providers also offer round-the-clock support, how-to videos, and written tutorials that help you make the most out of your tools so you can effectively accomplish promoting accountability in the workplace.
You can also delve into discussions on forums to ask for help on how to increase accountability in the workplace. You might pick up a few nuggets of wisdom from other establishments that face similar struggles in creating a liable professional landscape.
Promoting accountability in the workplace leads to trust
Trust rests on the shoulders of confidence that your workforce is moving towards similar goals as you. It’s the solace that stems from knowing that everybody’s putting the same effort and energy into their work.
Promoting accountability in the workplace establishes and nurtures trust. Trust urges your team members to take ownership and strengthens the air of accountability because when employees know and feel they’re trusted, they’re not going to throw that trust away by letting the entire staff down.
