Making values valuable
Organisational values are powerful tools. They describe who you are and what you stand for. Done right, they provide everyone with a sense of purpose and belonging.
Values should be designed for the long term, but they also need to live in the present.
Changing your values can seem daunting but, with buy-in and clear communication, it’s an opportunity to bring people together to create something important for the whole organisation.
At Firetail, our culture is important to us. Our values are the foundation of that culture. As we have been through the process of refreshing our own values, we’ve learned five lessons about how to make your values valuable.
How do you know when it’s time to revisit your values?
Organisational values are usually designed for the long term. If you change them too often, they can lose meaning. But they also need to live in the present. It can be worth considering whether a value that was conceived in the early days of your organisation is still relevant for your current needs and direction.
When might you want to take another look? Sometimes there are specific triggers or signs to watch for. For example:
Has there been a big change in your organisation?
Perhaps you have undergone a period of rapid growth and expansion. There might have been significant changes in your team, expansion into new markets, a merger or other combination. Many organisations have chosen to reflect on and revisit their values as part of their post-pandemic conversations about working life and culture.
Have staff forgotten them?
If no one can remember how you arrived at the values you have, or what they are, or how they connect to behaviours, then it is hard to say that they are an authentic, living part of your organisation.
Were they designed ‘top-down’?
Values that have been defined by a leadership team on an away day with no input from staff often result in low support and a lack of investment.
If the answer is yes to any of these questions then it might be time to revisit your values and reassess how they live in your organisation.
The process: how Firetail refreshed our values
Like everyone else, Firetail had to adapt and learn new ways of working through the pandemic. Our experiences of working with clients as well as each other changed. We wanted to revisit our values in a way that involved new members of the team, and to check and challenge those of us that have been part of Firetail for longer.
We brought our London and Berlin teams together after nearly two years apart. For some of the team this was the first time that they had met in person. Over this time together we worked hard to develop a set of values that we are really proud of and bind our team together.
We each took turns to generate a list of values that are important to us. We then shared these with each other and came to a short-list. Through further discussion, we refined our list to a set of values that everyone felt they could commit to. We talked about what they would start to look like in practice, what behaviours they would imply, and how we could keep them front of mind.
We tested our final list against a series of questions:
· Is it aspirational?
· Does it explain how we are making a difference to our clients and their work?
· Does it resonate with the team? Does it get people excited?
· Is it memorable? Are we using language that is easy to understand and unambiguous?
· Can we embed this across the team?
We focused on developing our values from concepts or single words into a series of ‘values statements’. These connect to more tangibly defined sets of behaviours.
This helped us to give some deeper context behind each of the values – describing what we will expect and see that will demonstrate each of them in action.
The lessons: five things we have learned about values
From our experience of going through this process with - both clients and with ourselves - there are five big lessons for anyone thinking about refreshing their values:
1. Involve the whole team in the process
If you want your values to truly be embedded in your culture, involve everyone to ensure they feel represented in the process of creating them.
Everyone needs to be involved, with an equal voice. For values to truly be at the centre of what you do, everyone needs to connect with them.
2. The process is as important as the output
How you do it matters as much as your final outputs.
To make that happen take a deliberately open agenda. It can feel self-indulgent to take time to ‘just talk’ about your culture and behaviours - but it is both important and effective.
By investing time in the process together you can create something meaningful, that matters and will change in the way you work together for the better.
3. Be true to yourself
Values need to be authentic if you want them to stick. It can be very easy to come up with a list of generic corporate-sounding values.
At the same time, there’s often too much pressure to come up with something that has been beautifully copy-written. In our process, we focused on getting our values to a state where there was genuine excitement in the room. Then we stopped.
This gave us some time to reflect on what we liked and what worked (and what didn’t and why). The process of refinement took some time but created ownership within the team and, crucially, sounded “like Firetail”. Ultimately we focused on getting something that we could all recognise and sign-up to.
4. Don’t wait for perfection
Take time with these conversations, but remember values are meant to be practical and actionable. They should influence and guide everyone’s behaviours and communications. Our values help us to make informed decisions about what we do and how we do it. Even after you’ve updated them, you’ll want to continue to define and refine them. Get them out there.
5. Know when to say goodbye
Choosing to ‘retire’ an established value can feel daunting. But it can actually be a positive. Once a value is so ingrained that it becomes a daily fixture in your team’s practice, then its work is done.
For us, the discussion that really cemented this was around our old value statement of ‘working with purpose’ which was one of our founding values. Now that it guides us and is reinforced in everything we do, we realised we no longer needed it as a ‘standalone’.
The output: Firetail’s values
We are positive
We believe in people
We focus on answers
We are optimists
We are collaborative
We solve problems together
We build long-term relationships
We know diversity is a strength
We are curious
We are interested in the world around us
We listen and seek to understand
We never stop learning
We are one team
We succeed and fail together
We support and care for each other
We trust each other
We work with integrity
We respect ourselves and our clients
We take responsibility
We tell the truth
We do work that matters
We care about the impact of our work
We commit to high standards
We hold ourselves accountable
A final thought: our values will never be ‘finished’
We are very proud of our new values and we believe they are right for now, and for us. They provide us with a shared and positive sense of purpose and belonging.
We live by our values every day, in the way we think and act in all our communications and working relationships, ensuring we’re all aligned and working with impact for our clients.
But our values remain a work in progress. They change with time, people and experience.
We will take time to reevaluate our values in the future, to ensure they remain true and relevant as we move forward.
Firetail works across sectors with clients on issues of organisational design, culture and values engagements of all kinds. If you’re interested in talking to us about this type of work, please do get in touch via rachel@firetail.co.uk.