Accountability never seems to not be a workplace topic. People study it, CEOs hammer it home at every turn and staff have it as a KPI no matter which job they’re in. Its importance is obvious, but its prevalence as a talking point seems to come down to the fact that accountability is a constant work in progress. Organisations the world over continue to attempt to get it right – debating, dissecting and re-engineering this critical workplace deliverable to try make it so.
Before we can even get into who’s getting it right or wrong, we need to understand what it is. In simple terms and from multiple dictionary definitions, accountability means taking responsibility for your actions and being held accountable for the results. Investopedia adds that it “implies a willingness to be transparent, allowing others to observe and evaluate one’s performance”.
This fairly straightforward definition is a different beast in the real world and is far more complex. Personalities, company culture, lack of clear deliverables and accountability guidelines, remote work and your actual job environment all impact on it and make it more than a simple tick-box exercise. So, why are so many of us getting it wrong? According to Harvard Business Review, data shows that “82% of managers acknowledge they have “limited to no” ability to hold others accountable successfully”. Those are some scary stats, but it begs the question: What is leadership doing to enable managers to hold employees accountable and, more than that, what values do companies espouse to help support ‘accountability in action’?
And for the wider workforce? It’s also far from right. A workplace accountability study conducted by Partners in Leadership with over 40 000 participants revealed that “85% of survey participants indicated they weren’t even sure what their organisations are trying to achieve”. You read that right. How do we breed accountability when employees don’t even know what the company goals are or what the longer-term trajectory looks like? As Lewis Carrol said: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get your there.”
Getting accountability right as a company
Let’s start with what companies can do to shift accountability in the right direction. The below key focus areas were adapted from How Spotify Balances Employee Autonomy and Accountability by Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, and indicate in which areas clarity and transparency are paramount in order to breed accountability and see it happen consistently. If being accountable in your organisation, or not being accountable, comes with the same consequences – managerial silence and zero feedback good or bad – then there are some critical steps missing in the accountability pipeline. Defining what the below areas look like for your organisation, and what tools, people, resources and software you need to make it happen, will start to move things forward.
Getting accountability right as an employee
And getting accountability right for employees? It starts with leadership and redefining the accountability process. Leaders need to foster a culture of trust and autonomy, where there are clear accountability boundaries but also the freedom to execute as an employee and the trust to do so. The other side of this is relooking the accountability ‘scorecard’. Accountability is often measured numerically and with little nuance – being rated on a scale of 1 to 5 in an annual performance review for example. Unbelievably (or maybe even believably) this makes us respond with a sense of being threated; we feel unsafe being labelled according to neuroscience research.
A way to combat this feeling, and the rigidity of the scorecard all together, is with empathy. Establishing empathy through “individual, authentic and repeated conversations” clarifies expectations and helps employees feel supported as they execute tasks according to Forbes. It’s in these same conversations that employees can weigh in on the scorecard dynamic. In their book Total Alignment, authors Riaz Khadem and Linda Khadem emphasise the importance of the individual scorecard – a scorecard per employee – which increases a sense of personal ownership as well as understanding, both in terms of what’s expected of them, and the trajectory of the company and way-of-work deliverables.
But it’s not all down to leaders and managers to make environments more ‘accountability hospitable’ in order to get this right. As an employee you need to also assess your own behaviour and understand why you’re not being accountable when you should be. Is your morale low and there’s a bigger problem going on? Are you downplaying the severity of your actions (or lack thereof) because of a co-worker power struggle? As in life, we need to self-reflect and not simply place blame on others for our accountability woes.
Getting accountability right if you use a Service Provider
The final piece of the accountability puzzle is Service Providers. How do we hold them accountable and ensure they uphold the same accountability standards as the company? The first step is clearly defining accountability and setting it out in black and white as part of your Service Level Agreement. You can learn more about originating a Service Level Agreement here. And then the same idea of trust and autonomy applies as applies to your employees.
And then, much like you would with your employees, it’s to give the Service Provider autonomy. You’ve hired them to perform a key function in your business and for their expertise. So, trust them to do their job and have very clearly-defined consequences if they do or don’t meet deliverables (which should be agreed upfront).
Something worth noting on the accountability front when it comes to Service Providers is that they give you, as their employer, an accountability safety net so to speak. By this we mean they are first in line to handle any disputes with their own providers or sub-contractors. Before you as a business get a whiff of unrest or unhappiness, your Service Provider is there putting out fires, negotiating, refusing sub-par work and more. After all, if they don’t perform due to someone else, it’s still their heads on the chopping block.
If you’re looking for a Service Provider who eats, sleeps and breathes accountability, then look no further than iLodge. We provide top-quality catering, accommodation and transport services for off-site, remote project teams and pride ourselves on meeting deliverables and deadlines no matter the project scope.
