3. Hire the right people
There’s no way around it—if you don’t hire the right people, it’s going to be difficult to get the right results. Who are the right people? Employees at every level who are willing to align themselves with the organization’s goals and mission.
It takes everyone to achieve organizational accountability. It’s not just leadership’s responsibility. All employees, from top to bottom, must do their part in working toward company goals. Every job matters and every employee adds to the greater good of the company.
While this is true, you will still need to identify key stakeholders who can help influence the entire company’s culture of accountability.
For activities requiring resources across the company, it helps to appoint “process champions” who are responsible for achieving results but may not have authority over necessary resources.
Both the influencers and the process champions serve important roles in creating accountability.
It’s important to understands that accountability belongs to everyone. When the company succeeds, businesses recognize and reward employees who followed guidelines, acted appropriately, and met or exceeded expectations. This underscores the need to work with the right people at every level.

4. Communicate with transparency
When you’ve set clear expectations and defined goal-focused accountability with the right people in place, what comes next? Following a solid plan for thorough and transparent communication.
Transparent communication is about more than being open and honest with employees. It means establishing communication standards, norms, and expectations. It means creating a safe space for honest dialogue, providing consistent and constant communication, and proactively seeking feedback.
Effective communication involves leveraging technology, mastering meetings, and taking control of mobile comms and cloud-based collaboration. It means keeping remote employees in the loop, making internal documents easily accessible, and breaking down communication silos.
When done right, transparent communication gives you the freedom to hold employees accountable to organizational expectations. And yes, it can be a complex process, but you don’t have to do it alone.
Document management tools like PowerDMS can help you communicate effectively, providing a platform for storing, updating, tracking, and distributing important documents to your workforce.
How does it work? PowerDMS lets you distribute new and updated documents to relevant groups. Once distributed, you can track who has viewed and E-signed each document. And to save you time, the platform sends automatic reminders to employees who have pending documents in their PowerDMS inbox. Learn how this feature, and more, can help your organization today.
5. Hold yourself accountable
Guess what? Accountability in the workplace starts with you.
When you create your own path for personal accountability, you demonstrate integrity, discipline, and respect. All traits of a great leader.
When you proactively approach employees to discuss their performance in a positive manner, it builds credibility with them.
When you go to bat for employees to help them get their jobs done, it builds trust and loyalty.
When you share the progress, challenges, and solutions of your own tasks, you model accountability and transparency for your team.
Your actions are the gold standard for accountability in the workplace. Employees will notice if you’re walking the walk. And if you are, it will inspire them to do the same. It all starts with you.