By Ed Mayo
To talk about values in the life of an organisation is like trying to tread on smoke. Everyone can see it is there, that it affects what happens, but it is not easy to capture and manage. As a result, it is common to develop value statements, and engage staff in a brief participatory exercise that soon fades away. It is harder to build values into the habits and life of the business; and yet this is where the real prize for compliance lies.
Values above all need to be tangible. Bringing the values to life is not just about internal communications within the organisation – another corporate video or CEO blog – but about translating values by putting them into context, in stores or offices or vans or on screens, and enabling dialogue to explore and build credible expectations of how people work and align with those values. Values can be ‘primed’ in this way. As Michael Sandel wrote in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are ‘like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise’.
A well-developed set of values, coherent and shared across the business, has the potential to create a powerful alignment across the organisation, from top to bottom, side to side.
The environmental consultancy and charity Forum for the Future asks its staff team to vote on which value to prioritise for the period ahead. Staff champions help to be advocates and reminders of values in the workplace. Putting values into corporate communications, internally and externally, is a good reminder. Stories are powerful ways to transmit values. Engaging people emotionally is helpful, as values are often about instinct and feeling, more than logic and reason. Above all, you want to create enough of a common vocabulary and allow enough of a conversation across the organisation in relation to values.
If values are no more than a poster on the wall, you shouldn’t expect staff, partners or observers to be impressed. Honesty is one of the most common values espoused by financial services companies, often with the implicit encouragement of their regulators. But as Steve Marinker, Partner and Head of Maitland Corporate, cautions “I would urge businesses to think hard about values such as integrity, responsibility, transparency and trustworthiness. Most people will consider these to be universally desirable behaviours rather than distinctive and informative glimpses into corporate culture. It is rather like introducing yourself at a party as someone who has never once kicked a dog or stolen from the elderly and expecting a round of applause.”
The ideal is to embed values in the life of a business, from top to bottom, in the same way that the beverage company Innocent was first to put its brand values over every inch of the drinks carton. If they are important, they can inform staff feedback, appraisal, competences, learning and development, recruitment and reward. Values can go beyond the workplace too, of course: supply chains and procurement, brand, customer service, product development and innovation.
The global publisher RELX operates with one value that always gets people talking – ‘boundarylessness’. You have to ask what that is, and staff do. For a publisher of leading science and academic journals, each with its own focus and each with its own editorial board, success in terms of business culture is all about going beyond the silos. Dr. Marcia Balisciano, Director of Corporate Responsibility at RELX comments that “values are key to the sustainability of any company. What matters to its people, its customers, its community?”
An inspiring example is the values of the educational company Build-A-Bear. Their six core values, which are used internally in the workplace include Colla-bear-ate and Cele-bear-ate. “Di-bear-sity,” the last value to be added, was named through a company-wide contest. The company, which has a majority of women at staff, manager and executive level, was named one of the top ten business employers on diversity in 2015.
Sharon John, Build-A-Bear’s CEO, says the core values were not on the list of things she wanted to change when she came to the company a time of turmoil in 2013. “These are life values as well as company values,” she says, “They are unifying for our organization.”
There is a growing toolkit for values in business that I have charted in a new short book published by Greenleaf. This ranges from how to recruit for values through to values in supply chains, or in governance. There is enough good practice alongside the many cautionary stories to encourage us to believe that we can aspire to be as rigorous, evidence based and creative on matters of corporate culture and compliance as the business is on the more traditional remits of inventory, sales or accounts.
As Build-A-Bear says, in line with the bear stuffing that children do in their workshops, “the good stuff is the stuff inside”.
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Ed Mayo is author of a new book, Values: how to bring values to life in your business. With a father who was one of the UK’s first Compliance Directors in the City of London, he directs Co-operatives UK, a network for co-operative and mutual enterprises and chairs Involve, a non-profit focused on participatory democracy.
Values is published by Greenleaf and available on http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/online-collections/values
The illustration is by Frankie Mayo, Ed’s son.