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 every day. This is where values can help. Most organisations have a set of corporate values, which in theory helps to both define and shape the unique internal culture, which in turn is a powerful driver of business performance.
Defining a clear set of corporate values is a component part of developing a high performance culture, which is increasingly seen as a means to secure sustainable competitive advantage. A high performance culture is not something that can be easily or quickly replicated and when momentum is built up it becomes an established part of life in the organisation. Values-related action at work should be as natural as discussing last night’s television or tomorrow’s weather.
Every business needs some distinctiveness and personality. The values vocabulary is relatively limited, and can tend towards truisms, but its interpretation can be individual and dynamic, creating an environment that promotes acceptable levels of initiative and appropriate degrees of risk taking amongst employees.
Values in action
There are three key stages in making values work, once the values themselves have been defined. The stages are consensus, communication and reinforcement.
We start from the premise that an organisation has developed – or wishes to develop – a set of values to reflect and describe its strategic ambitions. Bringing them into the public (or semi-public) domain serves no purpose unless it makes a discernible difference to the whole organisation: 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.
1. Consensus:
We interpret consensus as a position reached by the relevant group of people, rather than imposed. Creating a sense of enthusiastic ownership on the part of the staff will go a long way towards ensuring the desired outcome.
One of our clients addressed consensus by a series of workshops in which employees discussed the company values in relation to identifiable aspects of their own working lives. The people concerned were brought together for a conference, with values at the top of the agenda, and the management facilitated a consensus that provided a democratic foundation on which to build.
This is one approach; methods used should reflect the cultural and geographical reality of the organisation.
2. Communication
The consensus 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 and their practical application as quickly as possible.
All staff need to be convinced and regularly reassured that their job is worth doing, and worth doing well. Values are the organisation’s way of formalising and structuring its approach, but they only make sense if their aim is understood and accepted.
3. Reinforcement
Place a visible premium on identifying exemplary behaviour in support of the values, endorsing it promptly and publicly. 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’.
Any debate this initiates within the organisation is a good thing. If people can discuss and agree what needs to be done to gain recognition and approval, then half the battle is won. The remainder can be secured by simple guidelines on practical implementation through what individuals can actually do. As well as providing a basis for commendation and recognition, and keeping the values in the public eye, such measurement generates powerful management information about performance by location, by job role and by function.
Peer recognition is an important element in reinforcement: many ‘good deeds’ are performed out-of-sight of managers, but they are rarely unseen by colleagues as well. The enlightened employer will provide a way of making this public, so that my colleague’s actions can be publicly recognised and appreciation recorded.
