Making corporate values work

By Rik Burrage, Grass Roots

One of the biggest challenges faced by any organisation is how to translate its corporate strategy into something that the individuals who represent it can understand and act upon on every day.

Defining a clear set of corporate values is a component part of developing a high performance culture, crucial in sustaining a company’s competitive advantage. A high performance culture is not something that can be easily replicated by the competition. When momentum is built up it becomes an established part of life in the organisation.

Every business needs some distinctiveness in the market place. The values vocabulary is relatively limited, and can tend towards truisms, but its interpretation can be individual and dynamic, creating an environment that promotes initiative and appropriate degrees of risk taking amongst employees.

Values in action

Once the values have been defined there are three key stages in making values work - consensus, communication and reinforcement.

We start from the premise that an organisation has developed a set of values to reflect and describe its strategic ambitions. Bringing them into the public domain serves no purpose unless it makes a real and discernible difference to the organisation as a whole: simply making the Board feel better is not enough.

The process of installation must remove any ambiguity and inconsistency about what is desired: organisations that apparently have a different set of internal and external values can hardly expect to achieve a cohesive approach. Consistency of the message and the manner of its delivery is also important.

Consensus
We interpret consensus as a position reached by the relevant group of people, rather than one imposed upon them. Creating a sense of enthusiastic ownership on the part of the staff will go a long way towards ensuring the desired outcome.

Communication
Whatever the consensus reached, it should be confirmed and communicated as a reference point, using appropriate technology and media. People who subsequently join the organisation will need to be acquainted with the Values as quickly and as simply as possible.

Reinforcement
The organisation must place a visible premium on identifying exemplary behaviour in support of the Values, endorsing it promptly and publicly. Otherwise the exercise may soon become ‘just another initiative’. This is a central strand to developing the right behaviour into the right habits and natural actions: it means translating the exemplary behaviour into something that relates to ‘your reality’ and ‘your job role’.

In summary, a few tips for making values work:

Do
• Put time, effort and energy..and budget into making values meaningful
• Ensure they are championed at the top…but arrived at through consensus
• Ensure they are evident in those with management responsibilities and those who are successful within the organisation
• Communicate them with vigour, but not intrusively – the screen saver and mousemat may be a step too far
• Reward values-evident activity…promptly and publicly
• Facilitate peer nominations for values related reward
• Build your values into your recruitment process

Don’t
• Put some posters up and think 'job done'
• Impose a set of words because the board likes them
• Have a vote because it is quicker and we need to get on with some real work
• Use them as a stick to beat people with or allow them to stifle initiative
• Expect a culture change overnight
• Allow the cynics (there are always some) to undermine what you are trying to do

Rik Burrage is managing director of Grass Roots, an international provider of motivational and performance improvement services.