Company values are part of the cultural furniture for many businesses. Proudly shared across websites, recruitment materials and on office displays, they are intended to be a summary of what an organisation believes to be important, and by extension what colleagues should focus on when making decisions, working with each other, supporting customers and beyond.
Kristen Gale, writing in Forbes Magazine, provides a nice summary:
“Core values, also known as key principles that guide a company’s actions, are integral to business success because they unify a group of people around a common goal. They give teams purpose and tell them the behavior set that you, as a leader, value above all else.”
And these values matter to colleagues. Research from many sources shows that increasingly employees consider an organisations’ values carefully when applying for roles. What do you stand for? What do you see as important? These are things that carry real meaning for employees considering roles.
Your values are there to underpin your culture. They inform decision-making. They guide the way you develop products and services. They act as a governing idea that shapes your customer experience.
So why do I raise the question? Why ask whether these values matter?
The values gap
As employees are paying closer attention to company value statements, there is growing evidence that they are seeing a gap between what is said and what is experienced. Work by Gallup, for example, demonstrated that many US employees felt a deep disconnect between their employers’ values and their experience of how that company acted.
Put simply, the words on the wall did not match the action of the business.
Your values must be evident in the way your business and its people operate. That starts right at the top. As a leadership team, how often are you asking, ‘is this decision in line with our values’? If the answer is ‘rarely’ then that’s something that needs to be addressed.
If one of your values is agility and it takes three months to order a new laptop, maybe something is a bit out of sync. Do your processes and policies stand up to scrutiny through the lens of your values? If not, can you change them so they do?
The values stick
Another value trap is when values statements become a stick rather than a carrot.
Your values should be there to guide and advise. They set a standard and tone for how your organisation and its people should operate. A well-designed set of values facilitates easier working as colleagues are better able to navigate the workplace, clear on how they relate to each other and the wider world.
The risk is that well-intentioned values become a controlling mechanism. They are relegated to a performance management tool to assess employees at the end of the year or a rulebook to monitor colleague behaviour. The values and associated behaviours become prescriptive and instructive rather than facilitating.
This is a dangerous place to be, especially if you also see a value gap. It becomes ‘do as I say, not as I do’.
If your values are becoming a performance tick-box exercise, you may want to look at a refresh or a reposition to help bring them to the fore in a more active and productive way.
The disconnected values
Values statements are often the output of deep strategic and cultural reviews which build beautifully realised statements of company direction.
And then they are released to employees to a collective shrug of the shoulders and the world moves on.
Employees either feel no sense of ownership in the values statements or worse, just don’t see them as relevant to what they do. They don’t connect the values to the work, customers or the brand promise.
When reviewing and building values statements, hearing the views of employees is a vital building block that can help root your intentions in an idea that will resonate across the business.
We advise clients to keep three ideas in mind when working on values – simple, relevant, action:
- Are they simple to understand?
- Will colleagues see how they are relevant to their roles?
- Is it clear what the expected action is?
If the answer to any of those questions is ‘no’ or ‘um’ then you probably need to do more work on the positioning and language!
The values mountain
You start with a simple set of values, and then over time you add some more as your business changes and responds to new challenges. And then you start to define the behaviours for each value and the performance measures associated with these. And someone then suggests that these need to be differentiated for different types of roles or seniority.
What started as a simple statement about your business and what it stands for can become an overwhelmingly complex set of rules that are difficult to navigate.
As is often the case, simple is better. Review the values regularly and test whether they still have meaning in the current context for your business. Do they support a mindset ready for your current or future strategy or were they part of the last strategic cycle? Aim to drive out layers of explanation and keep the narrative easy to understand wherever someone is in your organisation.
Help with your values
We’ve worked with many clients on the development, launch and embedding of their values. Whether these are new to the business or a refresh of long-standing values, we can help navigate some of the risks and make sure your approach meets the needs of your business, colleagues and clients.