How to choose the right company values

If you follow us on LinkedIn you’ll know that yesterday we launched the Cosy Meerkat manifesto. Nothing to do with running for election to parliament, we chose the word manifesto, rather than the more widely-used values, because we felt the who and why of what Cosy Meerkat is was better conveyed in sentences rather than a set of individual words. If you’re interested, you can find out more about what we’re like to work with here, but if you’re hoping to come up with or, perhaps, change your company values, having just gone through the process ourselves, here are our top tips to make it a success:

1)    Ignore what other people have done. As we’ve said before, values are only worth having if you live and breathe them. So, even if you think another company’s values would sound pretty good as your own, forget them. Values need to be specific to you. More and more, consumers and employees want to deal with and work for organisations whose values resonate with them, but if your values are chosen for show and you don’t ‘walk the walk,’ you’ll be found out.  

2)    Be genuine, yet aspirational. Start by pulling back and thinking about the why: why does your company exist? What is its purpose? And what is your vision for its future? Values not only need to feel true, they need to feel aspirational. They also need to be rooted in behaviours so that they’re actionable. Any words you come up with, think about what you would expect from employees if you want them to live them.  

3)    Look for data and insights which might help you choose your set of words. If you’ve recently done a staff survey, what comes out strongly, particularly in the verbatim comments? What words do employees use to talk about the company? Are there any common themes that represent what’s important to them? If you’ve already got a set of values, how are they perceived? Or do you have anything consumer-facing, such as a brand promise, which might help set the tone and sentiment? 

4)    Don’t feel you need to sum yourself up in just five words. If the idea of values feels too confining, dare to be different. Conveying what your organisation is all about can be done in sentences (see our manifesto!). If you’re a design business, you might, for example, choose pictures to sum you up. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it represents you. One small caveat though, whatever you decide to call it, your values, manifesto, principles, behaviours or cultural framework should always be short and sweet. We’d recommend a maximum of five points. This is all about communication, after all. 

5)    Include employees in the formation of your values. Don’t just let management or the Internal Comms team decide what’s meaningful for your organisation; to be a success this needs to be a team effort. Depending on your size, you might be able to be really collaborative and make the initial brainstorm an event everyone can be included in. If not, get input from a range of employees right at the start, use them to sense check your ideas and get final feedback. In other words, test, test, test!

6)    Don’t be afraid to change your values. While they should feel right for now, it’s worth acknowledging that just as your organisation will change over time, so might your values. Re-assessing further down the line is not just fine, it’s a good thing to do.   

7)    Plan your comms. There’s no point spending all this time on your values and then failing to properly communicate them. If you have a comms team, make sure to work with them from the start on an integrated plan which will wrap around the process – from creation, to launch and any subsequent reviews. 

8) Behaviours are key. If behaviours are a wall, the values are the paint on that wall. Values should be simple to grasp and motivational. Behaviours are the practical application of the values. Together they create a clear path of what’s expected of your team.

Defining your values means stepping away from the day job and that in itself can be an invigorating process. We recently ran a workshop for one of our clients where we asked them to start off by thinking about their own personal values and what they liked about the people they loved, and that was before we even started talking about the values that defined their business. It wasn’t only fun, it was inspiring. And that’s how we felt writing our own manifesto too. Defining your values should be an opportunity to remember your purpose – and, ultimately, isn’t that something we’d all like to have at work?