Image credit: Sarah Willcox
(Unless you really mean it)
Values keep coming up in our work, so we’ve been thinking about them a lot lately. Here’s our view: if you’re only going to put them on the website and in the recruitment pack, don’t bother.
The Oxford Character Project’s 2022 UK Business Values Survey found that UK companies most often list ‘Collaboration’, ‘Integrity’ and ‘Excellence’. Fine words, and you could swap them between most organisations without anyone noticing. That’s the problem.
A poster isn’t a plan
Picking a handful of values, including them in a strategy document, adding them to the careers page and hoping for the best achieves nothing. Worse, it creates a gap between what you say and what people see, and your team will spot it before you do. Even worse than that, it erodes trust. Which is not what you want if you're trying to get people to buy into your vision for the future.
If you do want values, here’s what it takes.
Organisations don’t have values. People do.
Each member of your team has personal values, some of them highly specific, and that’s fine. Organisational values are the ones you want people to draw on at work. They can differ from what individuals hold personally, but if they directly clash, you’ve got a problem.
If a competitor could use them, scrap them
Good values say something specific about you. What makes you different from others doing similar work? What will leadership, working life and the client experience feel like?
Aim high
A value should be something you’re always moving towards. It describes something you can ‘be’, or a quality you bring to an action, not something you tick off.
Test them in the real world
A value has to hold up in lots of different situations. 'Collaboration' (number 1 on the Oxford list) doesn't work as a value, for example, if your systems and processes continue to reinforce siloed working. 'Attentiveness', one of our own, is always welcome and I can't think of a single circumstance where it's not useful.
And when things get crunchy and you have to make a difficult decision, your values should give you an indication of the direction you need to take. If they don’t, they’re not doing what they should for you.
Show, don’t tell
A value is an abstract word until you attach behaviours to it. How do you know when someone is being ‘Hopeful’ (number 37 on the Oxford list)? What have you actually seen them do?
Use them or lose them
If ‘Pioneering’ (number 18 on the Oxford list) is a value of yours, what does it mean for the decision on your desk today? And if your actions contradict your stated values, you’d be better off with none.
So which is it? Do you really mean them, or should you bin them? We’d love to hear what you think.
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Email: sarah@fairisleprojects.co.uk
