Launching your values? Try living them first.
People often ask me which type of companies I want to work with. My answer is: those who get it.
What do I mean by that? Let me share a personal example.
When I lived in Sydney, I headed up internal comms at Microsoft Australia on a maternity cover contract.
I’d come from financial services and the difference in culture blew my mind. I had to adapt from what I was used to, but I loved it. I swore it had ruined me working for anyone else ever again.
So, what did this culture look like in practice?
People only joined after a thorough interview process. They had a motto: ‘An ok hire is a no hire.’ Once you were in, there was no probation period. You were helped to succeed.
My colleagues were awesome at their jobs. They turned up to meetings on time, took their actions and delivered. You never needed to chase.
The management genuinely cared about every single member of their team. I once sat in a leadership meeting where a restructure was being planned. I saw them go over it again and again until they’d found everyone a role.
The MD cried at an all-hands the first time Microsoft went through job cuts — and then personally called every single people manager who’d had to let someone go to check they were ok.
In my first week, I asked if I could come in late one day a week to attend pilates for my scoliosis. My manager told me I never had to ask her about stuff like that because she trusted me to get the job done.
Annual employee events that got feedback like: “It’s been a really tough year, competing against Apple and Google, but today I was reminded why I’ll never leave Microsoft”.
What was their secret?
The leadership team had been through an extensive development programme, based on the book Conscious Business: How to build value through values. As a result of that work, they’d created a way of working that they all signed up to and held one other accountable for.
By the time I joined, they had begun to share this way of working with people managers and a group of “culture champs”.
Being new and keen, I offered to get started on a comms strategy to roll these values out more widely — to all employees. But the HR Director told me not to.
She said: “We won’t start talking to employees until our people managers are living the values day to day. So that when we do, they’ll know we’re serious — because they’ll have already seen the values in action from their managers.”
Think about that for a moment…
Think about the time it takes to do the work as a leadership team to not only define your values, but to incorporate them into your day-to-day work.
Think, too, about the time taken to do the same with the next level down in the organisation — your people managers.
And only when they’re all living and breathing the values do you start talking to employees about them.
Compare that process with what happens all too often:
Leadership creates a set of values that don’t ring true (and very often are just table stakes values).
The values are “launched”.
Nothing changes. Everyone knows it’s just a tick-box exercise. And if people were already feeling demotivated, maybe they now feel even worse than they did before.
At Broom & Moon, like my ex-colleagues at Microsoft Australia, we believe in the value of values. We can help you:
Consult with your people to uncover what your values should be.
Articulate your values, using language that resonates with your employees, future employees and customers.
Embed those values so that they make a real difference to your people — and your profits.
Sounds good? Drop us a line.
