Values under the spotlight
UPDATE March 2022: Tell us about the value, role and challenge of your own company values. Take part in our survey: Making Values Matter
I’ve spent much of this year working with a global third-sector organisation helping to articulate and then engage teams with a new set of values. So I was interested to hear reflections on the power (and otherwise) of values at this week’s HRD Community Virtual Experience.
In the two sessions I facilitated – change across cultures, and maintaining culture in a distributed organisation – the subject of values came up a lot. So how have values helped organisations navigate the pandemic? And how (or are they) informing conversations about the future and new ways of working?
Before I jump in, let’s set a bit of context. All organisations have values in some form that dictate how the work gets done. Sometimes they’re buried in a culture and implicit. Other times they are clearly expressed and evident in the culture and the work. And then, of course, there are many cases where they’re clearly expressed, but in no way reflected in the work or the culture. In such instances, the real values, ie the ones dictating how works get done and how things happen, are at odds with what’s written on posters on the wall and the company website.
What I’m talking about here, is those organisations that have done the hard graft and soul searching to uncover and then articulate a core set of values to guide work, keep the culture on track, and attract similarly motivated people.
Below I’ve started to capture some of the positives that values have given organisations over the last 18 months. I’ve also noted the trickier bits. This list is by no means comprehensive. No doubt it will grow. So do share your thoughts and I’ll add to this blog post over time. We may even put together something of a report or a white paper.
Values positive – where values are helping
1. Better decisions
Critical decisions have confronted organisations faster, in greater volumes and with more urgency than ever during the pandemic. Avoiding clichés about ‘unprecedented times’ (ok, not really avoiding, just flagging the cliché) decision making has been tough and pressurised. Values have provided a steer and a checklist, giving a sense of certainty and direction. In just one example, the third-sector organisation I was working with told me how the values had helped the board reach agreement over a significant new hire in a global role.
2. New conversations
The question that doesn’t go away: How do we maintain (or grow) a culture when people are distributed? There’s no single answer. But talking – a lot – can help you discover some answers. Values have provided the ingredients to start conversations and fuel new forums and activities to keep culture on track. The UK arm of one global electronics business has created weekly values lunch sessions, for people to get together and explore a value and what it means to them. The values are providing the stimulus for much needed dialogue.
3. Stronger connection
A physical space can bind people together. As one CHRO I spoke to this week put it: “Our culture is in our office.” Context or environment is the key factor in how people behave (alongside individual needs and motivations). Remove it and you take away a whole layer of behaviours that help to connect people and keep them connected (from chats over the kettle, to walking meetings). Values can rebuild some of that context to create new connecting behaviours.
Pattern, a Sydney-based e-commerce business, moved its virtual values week online during lockdown. Each day the team celebrated one of the company’s values.
As Head of Business Development Dan Richardson puts it: “Today we celebrate being a #teamofdoers by participating in a 5k race, run or (dog) walk. Under normal circumstances our Sydney and Melbourne teams would be doing this together but, you know, lockdown :( However, it's been awesome to see the photos shared on Slack as everyone gets away from their desks and enjoys some brilliant spring weather.”
Alfie enjoying Pattern's values week
4. And what else? Where have your values helped you navigate the pandemic? Take part in our Making Values Matter survey and be part of the conversation about company values and their role as we face a world of disruption and instability.
Values crunch – the trickier bits
1. Making them real (specificity matters now more than ever)
Posters on the wall do not make values real. We all know that. But it’s easier to believe they are in some way real if they’re visible. Remove the walls, and the values can soon disappear altogether. Values mean nothing if people don’t see them in action and don’t know how to bring them to life in their own work. For our global third-sector client, rather than defining a set of behaviours to support the values, we worked with employees around the globe to identify “values in action”. Put it another way, what are people doing, when they’re living the values at work? This is not a definitive list. That’s an impossible task at the best of times, especially when you’re talking about a global team. Rather the values in action are designed to help local HR teams, leaders, managers and colleagues to embed the values into the work, as well as into recruitment, performance management and ongoing conversations.
2. Tension with the new realities
How many organisations have a value that says ‘do the right thing’ or something similar? This isn’t a blog about creating values that are meaningful, so I won’t comment on the usefulness or otherwise of such a value. However, it’s easy for everyone to get behind a value like this when things are going well. And it’s easy to assume everyone is on the same page about what ‘right’ means. But, when (as was the case with one global travel business) there were redundancies, ‘do the right thing’ looked a bit hollow in the eyes of some employees. There is no answer to this. But, we all need to revisit our values once in a while to understand how they might be viewed and how they operate when the context shifts.
3. Relevance to new ways of working
Values should reflect what’s important to an organisation. They are the how that allows you to deliver on your why, your purpose. But when everything about the way you work changes overnight, the how might come into question too. For many organisations, the pandemic changed everything. As one CHRO put it at the Virtual HRD Experience: ‘What are our values and do they still mean the same thing. No, they’ve changed.” The lesson here, keep your values in focus. Are they truly what matters when it comes to how things get done, or has something changed that needs to be reflected in your values?
4. And what else? What’s challenging with your values right now and what are you doing about it? Take part in our Making Values Matter survey.
