It’s important you get your company values right, they can transform your employee satisfaction, galvanise your company culture and motivate your teams to work hard for a shared vision.
There’s no right or wrong, your values will be unique to your business and are tailored to link to what works well for your team, your culture and your way of working.
Starting Points
Have a look around to see what’s been done before, and how it works for existing businesses. Look around the mortgage & protection industry to see what others are up to, and take a step back to see the wider business market. Look out for anything that piques your interest, and the kind of business you aspire yours to be.
Think about your values, what’s important to you, your culture and work ethic – and why you got into business in the first place. Take time also to think about what values don’t resonate with you, it’s equally insightful to know what you don’t like, as well as what you do.
Input From Your Team
Once you’ve a few ideas on the values you want to bring to your company, it’s a good point at this stage to involve your staff. They will be the ones who will also live and breath those values, so it makes sense to get them on board from an early stage, this will also mean that your team will feel more empowered at the opportunity to shape the future direction of the business.
Consider arranging a session for you and your team away from the workplace to help with the idea generation, being out of the office will help boost creativity. Start by noting down your ideas and some examples from other businesses’ values to help set the scene, and then open discussion up to the team and jot down everyone’s ideas.
Here are some questions to help spark your thinking:
- How do you feel about working with your team?
- What are you proud about as a group?
- How do customers perceive you?
- What will you be like in 12, 24, 36 months?
- What is important to you?
- What will success look like?
- How do you describe your culture?
Polishing the ideas
Following on from your initial session with the team, it’s likely you will need to undertake some refinement of the ideas before settling on the final values that mean the most to everyone. Group the different ideas into clusters of similar themes to help you identify common values to work towards.
Generally, your values will be most likely to succeed if they are:
- Simple
- Emotive
- Positive
- Meaningful
- Unique
- Memorable
Of all these qualities, unique is the most important – your values must be tailored to your business and not be too generic or they will lose meaning. Try to keep things concise, short and snappy and stick to 5 main values for your business, so that everyone can remember them.
Living your Values
The most important thing is then embedding your values into the business, and you’ve got to truly live them, for them to work. To help you and the team in this process, think about:
- Communicating them in the workplace – whether it’s painting them on the walls or putting them all over your company intranet
- Make a reward or recognition programme based on living the values
- Use them in the recruitment process – which candidates display the traits your business seeks?
- Reflect them in your branding – let your clients know what you’re working towards and create consistency of expectation for these values, inside and outside the business.
Summary
The time taken to create effective company values is well worth it in the long run – your business can really be pushed forward by an engaged team who are all focused along the same lines and working to the values that you yourself believe in and have created. Invest time in creating something unique and personal to your business and celebrate your team when they show that they are living those values day in, day out.
