Parts of this article were written by Amelia Friedman (the COO at Hatch Apps, an automated platform that enables business leaders to build apps without coding. Amelia has been recognized as a Y Combinator Fellow, a Halcyon Fellow, and a Washingtonian Tech Titan).

When Tony Hsieh (one of the founders of Zappos), was asked what he would do differently if they could restart the company from scratch, he responded with this: “If I could go back and do Zappos all over again I would actually come up with our values from day one.”

So it is important to develop your core values as early as possible as this will help to create a lasting and positive effect on your business and its culture.

Must Do’s:

Develop your corporate values together as a team

Creating values on your own and then pushing them down to the team does not work. People cannot just be told what to find meaningful — a values system is something that you develop over the course of years, and it is not easy to change overnight.

With Indigo Financial, we all worked on the process together so we could come up with the core values that were core to us. By including everyone on our team in the process we were able to tap into values that people already held and uncover core values that we, as a business, were already living.

This helped us avoid those aspirational but essentially meaningless values (Aspirational values are those that a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks. A company may need to develop a new value to support a new strategy, for example, or to meet the requirements of a changing market or industry) that leaders often impose on an organization in an attempt to re-sculpt culture. Values developed with everyone involved are more likely to be unique to your business — and differentiated values go hand in hand with better performance.

Give people the chance to get involved and contribute

We met as a group and discussed our existing core values, as well as our opinions on the values systems that would be best suited for our business. We asked all team members to start thinking about questions like: What is important to us? What do our existing values mean and do we need to adjust and or add to them? What values should govern the way we interact with each other and with our clients?

Get all ideas out there and then put them in order of how we would like them 

When we sat down together, we started by writing down all of the potential values on sticky notes on the wall. This was a joint exercise with everyone discussing pros and cons etc at the same time. After about 60 minutes when we were all out of suggestions, we then started digging deeper into each value that we had noted. Was it us? Did it reflect how we wanted to treat each other and our other stakeholders? We then worked through and selected the values that resonated with us.

As a group identify a shortlist of values 

We all agreed on the core values and their wording. From there, we had an open discussion about what we valued as a company. General themes emerged from our lists, and we discovered and discussed areas where we didn’t agree. After another hour of discussion, we ultimately agreed on eight core values.

At the time, there were fourteen of us and we were fortunate to reach agreement relatively quickly. For some teams, a couple of hours won’t be enough, however, and you may need to take time to reflect and meet several times. Or this may be an activity you do at a full-day or 2 day offsite and we can facilitate that (if you like). We have run quite a few sessions for businesses and assisted them with crafting their core values as well as helping them with culture, leadership, mission, vision, strategic planning etc.

Discuss everyone’s interpretation

Understanding what your chosen values mean is critical to ensure they are implemented and are lived and breathed by the team. In fact, an employee who knows and understands their corporate values is 51 times more likely to be “fully engaged” at work.

Don McPherson, President and Co-Founder of Minnesota-based Modern Survey, noted that when people say they know and understand the organizational values of the company they work for, those people are 51 times more likely to be “Fully Engaged” than people who work at an organization without known values.

Why do organizational values mean so much to employee engagement? The fact is that values don’t drive engagement. However, the absence of values makes full engagement almost impossible. This isn’t an anomaly. Having values in your organization and having employees who live those values is a foundational part of making high levels of employee engagement possible. Without values that are lived and breathed every day, your organization can expect to have average levels of engagement at best. 

Once your company has its list of values, set aside time to discuss what each value means to you and to your teammates and how each one could and should be applied in your everyday work.

You must keep in mind that even the most well-intentioned employee may misunderstand or misapply a value. What is obvious to you now when you’re well-ingrained in the process may not be obvious to an employee that joins the team a few months later. Take the time to explain what each one truly means. This should be part of the induction into the business and this will ensure that everyone is aware and on the same page.

For this discussion, focus on addressing questions like:

• What does this value mean to us?
• What does it look like in action?
• How might it be misinterpreted?
• How will we evaluate adherence to it?
• How will it change our relationships or our interactions?

Try to synthesize your shared understanding into clear, direct explanations of how you will see, experience, and live those values in the workplace. Take the value of “respect” as an example. What does that look like at your company? How will your employees demonstrate their respect? Who will they be respectful of? How will that change their everyday behavior?

During this process, have a one of your team taking notes, and then send them off to nail down the precise wording and interpretations. Word choice is important since it will affect how the values are read and interpreted. Circulate an early draft among your team and then meet to discuss and finalize a few days later.

You may need to go through this process a few times — draft, meet, discuss, modify, redraft, and repeat — before landing on an interpretation that everyone can stand behind. That’s OK. The more thoughtful and intentional this process, even if it’s slow, the better.

Integrate your values

Posting your values in your break room isn’t nearly enough. It’s critical to identify any changes you’ll make or practices you’ll adopt to support their integration.

Amelia says: “In our case, our “maintain a growth mindset” value led to the addition of independent learning and professional development goals into our quarterly review process. Now everyone is asked, “What will you learn?” at the beginning of the quarter, and then held accountable for those commitments three months later. Part of our interpretation of our “results-oriented” value was that “we limit meetings to those that create value,” so all team members were immediately asked to revisit their schedule, and to shorten or eliminate meetings where possible”.

Bring together your team again to draft a plan for integrating your values. Go one by one to determine how they might become a part of your culture, or how you might build a rewards system that better aligns with them.

Look for ways that you can integrate values into hiring practices, induction, performance bonuses, and promotion opportunities etc. Be sure to highlight employees who are living examples of the values.

Also allow your values to evolve over time and reinforce them over time. Once a year, you should get the team together to discuss your values and determine whether your interpretations (or then values themselves) might need revisiting, or how you might even better integrate them in the coming year.

Thoughtful, well-implemented values can serve as the foundation for a positive, high-performance culture. It’s worth taking the time to get everyone on the same page by establishing corporate values, developing a mutual understanding of them, and then making them an integral part of your everyday work experience — and this is all much easier to accomplish when your team is still small.

Contact us to find out more and how we can help you develop your core values.