Comment by forcemajeure
7 years ago
I like this honesty and transparency, employers such as Microsoft encouraging it's employees to act in this way is a good thing.
Shutting down discussion behind lawyers and bland public statements should be discouraged.
We like it. But it can be actively harmful to the interests of the company. And its impossible for us to have the facts required to know if this is harmful. That's up to the company. So if they decide to fire employees who are spending their free time harming the company, we can't really get upset about that.
Its simply impossible to say, "no but this openness is good for the company" in an informed way. But we can certainly hope the company comes to this conclusion and encourages openness.
Collaborating across departments with people from different functional areas has absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty or lack of transparency.
If you have good people in those positions in your organization, they will come together and make good decisions.
If you don't have the right people in those positions, then that's not going to be a good thing irrespective of my advice.
Transparency doesn't require anarchy and anarchy doesn't buy transparency.