Organisational Values – We All Need Inspiration

Building Businesses to Believe in

Organisational values are the guiding principles that provide businesses with their purpose and direction. They help companies shape their goals, and influence their interactions with employees, customers and external partners. Organisational values are a major part of businesses’ corporate culture. But when CEOs and their leadership teams don’t live out the values they espouse, businesses drift. And employees, customers, external partners and investors lose heart.

In this article, we consider what organisational values are and how they are crucial in steering a business. We look at different businesses’ core values, from Capgemini to Tesco. And we look at how you can work on your core values, and make your business healthier and more resilient.

Trigger Warning! Some People Turn Off When Leaders Talk About Values

Leaders are responsible for making their businesses’ values reality. People judge their leaders, not just on how effective they are, but whether they’re authentic. When businesses have healthy values, from the CEO downwards, it benefits the bottom line. But when the bosses don’t live up to them, it can be disastrous.

Organisational values guide what people do at work. They set out the core ethics and principles the company lives by. The business’s values inspire employees’ best efforts and guide their actions. And consumers and customers are drawn to businesses based on sound principles.

You Write the Script

Here are five examples of organisational values that people quote:

• Integrity
• Innovation
• Collaboration
• Teamwork
• Passion

Positive values like these inspire individual performance and productivity and lead to employees achieving self-actualisation. Such values are particularly important in businesses whose success depends on client relationships and their teams’ best efforts.

Smells Like Team Spirit

If better teamwork is your Nirvana for your business, building a common set of values will be very helpful. When organisations build a common set of values, they affect the team positively, in many different ways:

• Help team members build respect.
• Resolve conflict.
• Establish trusting relationships.

Let’s Look At Two Famous Winning Teams And Their Core Values

Here are the stated core values of Capgemini, the digital and tech consultants:

• Honesty
• Boldness
• Trust
• Freedom
• Team Spirit
• Modesty
• Fun

The phrase ‘Team Spirit’ is there for all to see in Capgemini’s list. It’s easy for people to be sceptical about businesses’ underlying motives being anything other than profit. But it’s hard to find fault with any of Capgemini’s stated values.

Every Little Helps – It’s Enshrined in Tesco’s Values

We’re used to seeing the phrase Every Little Helps on Tesco shopping bags and in their stores. But look online, and they update their published values regularly, and this commitment is at the heart of it.

Stating your values clearly makes it easier to attract people to come and work for you. As one of Britain’s biggest employers, Tesco’s values appear on CTP.org/jobfinding, an MOD-supported job finding website for ex-services people. Here’s what it says:

“Since we first introduced our values more than a decade ago, they have become a central part of our culture. They make sure everyone at Tesco understands what’s important about how we work together as a team.”

After that, as you’d expect, the webpage says how customers are at the centre of what Tesco do. And then it leads into what their values actually are:

No One Tries Harder for Customers:

• Understand customers.
• Be first to meet their needs.
• Act responsibly for our communities.

We Treat People How They Want to be Treated

• Work as a team.
• Trust and respect each other.
• Listen, support and say thank you.
• Share knowledge and experience.

Every Little Helps Makes a Big Difference

• Helping to reduce food waste globally and ensuring surplus food goes to those in need.
• Making it easier to live more healthily.
• Sourcing great quality, affordable and sustainable products.
• Making a positive contribution to the communities we serve.

It’s way beyond this article’s scope to judge how successfully Capgemini or Tesco uphold their core values. But as written, it’s hard to find fault with either of their lists. And they confirm team spirit’s central importance when you craft similarly worthwhile values for your business.

Are We Talking Practical Values, or Ethical Values? A Lesson from Bananarama

In a moment we’ll look at how to establish and set down your core values. But first, let’s look at the important issue of businesses, from SMEs to Tesco, having both ethical and practical values.

Organisational values start with the individuals who lead them. And these values need to be fully rounded, covering ethics and working practice. Some commentators identify 5 core practical values for individuals in the workplace:

• Integrity
• Diligence
• Perseverance
• Discipline
• Accountability

Contrast this with the following list, this time setting out 5 core ethical values:

• Honesty: truthfulness, fairness and sincerity
• Fidelity: faithfulness to clients and loyalty to the business
• Charity: kindness, caring, goodwill, tolerance and compassion
• Self-discipline: acting with reasonable restraint and not indulging in excessive behaviour
• Responsibility: reliability, dependability and accountability

The difference between the two is, one is practical, and the other is ethical. As Bananarama sang in the 1980s, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results.  It’s interesting that accountability is the only word that appears in both lists. Because someone has to take responsibility.

Healthy Organisations Mean Fewer Resignations

Speaking of accountability, when you’re navigating complexity and uncertainty, you have to go by your values. It’s not our place to comment on what happened in Boris Johnson’s prime ministership. But we can say for sure, that you’ll avoid troubles like his in your business if you embrace these five core values:

• Integrity: Know and do what is right.
• Respect: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
• Responsibility: Embrace opportunities to contribute.
• Performance: Bring your best to everything you do.
• Servant leadership: You’re in charge, but you don’t just focus on your own advancement.

These characteristics probably won’t appeal to hard-boiled bosses and managers with authoritative leadership styles. They’ll probably say, Do your job, and get on with it! Not a response to make people feel inspired.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics promotes these characteristics, to help American college athletes make good life choices. So step up to the plate, like they say in baseball. If you’re a business boss in the UK, embracing these characteristics in your organisational values could be a game changer.

People You Work With Have Values Too

As a business leader, your values cover what matters to you, and the things you want to achieve. That’s true, whether you’re a sole trader or a corporate. But you also need to bring your people with you. In a business, there are three other types of values at play as well:

• Individual values.
• Relationship values.
• Societal values.

Earlier, we mentioned Capgemini’s stated core values – honesty, boldness, trust, freedom, team spirit, modesty and fun. This list we’re looking at now shows an appreciation of the need for healthy businesses’ values to harmonise with individual, relationship and societal values.

We mustn’t lose sight of this point. Sound organisational values motivate and sustain behaviour over the long run, and build great businesses. They are important because they help employees work towards a common purpose. And engaged employees more often than not have values aligned to their organisation’s values.

Your Starter For Ten – Are You Nice People To Do Business With?

The car dealer Currie Motors’ long-running local radio campaign had the end line “Nice people to do business with.” It promised their mechanics wouldn’t make you feel inadequate at your vehicle service if you didn’t know much about cars. And so you’d be more likely to come to them for your next car.

We choose people as our friends because we’re drawn to them and their values feel sympathetic. But if we then discover they don’t share the values we hold dear, we go off them! And the same thing applies to businesses.

As we’ve said, businesses’ organisational values are what matters to them and the things they want to do. They shape companies’ behaviour, but because businesses are run by flawed humans, sometimes things go wrong. And left unchecked, these bad habits become the norm. Unhelpful, even harmful, organisational values set in and become embedded, like in personal relationships.

But you can always change if you want to. The driving force in re-shaping organisational values is the leadership, drawing on their self-awareness about the business. The vision that inspires those inspiring mission statements and shapes the objectives and goals must come from the top. But all this takes time.

Even The Greatest Leader Won’t Be Able to Change Your Business Overnight

You have to realistic and accept that change won’t happen immediately. But a new leader stepping in and saying they’re going to listen and make positive changes will raise hopes and re-engage people.  So can an existing leader, who decides to take steps to empathise with their people. And a key part of that re-engaging and empathising is to focus on the values you share.

Here are eight steps you can follow to identify your organisational values and build a strong company culture:

1. Plan what you need to do to assess your current culture. You now have a number of further steps. Best to do them all! The steps are:
2. Carry out online surveys.
3. Hold informal meetings, where people feel free to speak openly and without impunity.
4. Listen to what the grapevine is saying.
5. Revisit your team charter, if you have one. How is it holding up? Is it working? If not, what’s going wrong?
6. Review your strategic business plan.
7. Use these insights to determine the culture you need in place to achieve your goals.
8. From what you now know, decide if your values and culture need to shift.

Every step of this insight gathering process calls for engagement and openness. And that could be problematic, because you‘re dealing with employees who are anxious about their job security. Remember, talking about possible change makes people feel threatened. You’re dealing with human beings.

Also, people may feel inhibited giving feedback, not least because of peer pressure and social anxiety. It can be difficult to speak openly at work, for all these reasons.  So it’s best to get someone from outside to collect the insights and present the findings to leadership. And importantly, external consultants are going to be objective. That’s what you’re paying them for.

Now You Have to Make the Change

So, the consultants have presented the findings to you. You’ve talked to the team, and everyone accepts what needs to be done. And you’ve used all the necessary internal communication channels to explain it to your people. Now, you have to make the change happen.

Having identified that a change is needed, it might be worth calling the HR consultants back in to help implement it. For one thing, your own HR people may not have the experience. And they have their ‘day job’ to do.

At this point, you might need to think about change management models. These play a key role in helping businesses design, plan and implement change and make their vision reality. And they help you understand what your people are going through.  Change is hard for people. But based on sound psychological insights, change management models help safeguard your staff’s wellbeing in challenging times.

You Want to Change? Read This

There are various change management models that people find helpful. In our change management models article we look at the McKinsey 7-S framework. This analyses how different aspects of a business fit together, which is helpful in understanding why things can be hard to get across. From there the article considers the employees’ psychological journey, with Bridges’ Transition, Scotter and Jaffe, Lewins’ Unfreeze-Refreeze, AKDAR, and more. And it looks at some models to help you plan, communicate and monitor the progress of change.

And Finally: You’ll Know When You Get There

These are signs of a business that embeds and lives its values:

• Values and related behaviours are emphasised, upheld and modelled by senior leaders.
• Values are clearly defined in concrete terms.
• The values are communicated to employees
• Values are tied to employee recognition, rewards and outcomes.

Putting values into practice involves two important steps

Define what your stated values really mean: Organisational values shouldn’t be seen as decrees that are there, like school rules, to hold you down. They should make it clear what specific behaviours and processes will achieve the kind of business you all want. And your people should have a clear understanding of how to put them into action.

Incorporate your values into your processes: Your values need to be integrated into all areas of your business, including recruitment. At the interview, ask candidates about their own values, and confirm your values in your employment contracts. And don’t make your stated company values sound phoney by rejecting candidates with curt letters or emails. Or worse, total silence after the interview!

Basing your business on solid values won’t just help you take on and keep the right people. You’ll build a business culture that’s empathetic, authentic and effective, and sets an example to inspire others.

We’ve talked at length about Tesco and Every Little Helps. Shopping around for ideas about your corporate values can only be a good thing. Another inspiring end line is Microsoft’s ‘90s slogan, ”Where do you want to go today?” Only you know the answer to that. But focusing on your organisational values will help you get there.