Putting your company values into action
By: Eva Balúchová
Tags: Remote Working, Scaleup, Startup, Culture, Team

wearebridgie.io by lovekozhukhovskaya

You’ve spent hours, days, weeks and months crafting your company values, hopefully in collaboration with all areas of your growing team. But now what?

Mission and vision are not just statements created as a formality. Between every mission statement are goals that should be achievable. When combined with the right values and strategies that align with business objectives, your company values can serve as a guideline for the mindsets and behaviours of the people to accomplish the goals together.

In this post, we’ll explore how to translate your company goals into tangible action. Culture is built from the ground up, and these tips are tailored towards connecting your vision with the daily realities of your team.

Create sparks

As a Harvard Business Review article put it, “core values are the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions; they serve as its cultural cornerstones”. If a company’s values align with the natural desires and actions of the employees, the values themselves will inspire action. In that sense, choosing the right values from the outset can be self-fulfilling. You’ll know if your mission is purposeful if your team rallies behind it and spark action to achieve goals.

When enough people love what they do, love why they are doing it and love who they are doing it with, they will make things happen. This passion alone can be a force that continually fuels future sparks of action.

Your hiring process is a key touchpoint for ensuring your vision manifests in teamwork. If a company selects employees who align with its values from the outset, it is generally easier for the right sparks of activity to occur.

2. Promote openess

Rework your daily activities to promote a culture of open and honest relations. Companies tend to flourish then surrounded by those who have a sense of moral upstanding and care deeply about their work.

As a founder, a good way to start is to communicate what’s happening strategically to all employees, bringing them closer to the mission. If you don’t already, create an all-hands meeting and/or maybe even launch an internal newsletter. Every employee touchpoint you build should reinforce the company values and highlight those taking action towards it (as positive reinforcement).

Chances are your company will increasingly be made up of diverse teams in which many opinions arise, often conflicting. When your company values honesty, openness and transparency, conflict can be potentially diffused quicker. The resulting meetings and discussions can be more direct and lead quickly to positive action. Business leaders can benefit from creating a culture that rewards and promotes their values even amongst differences of opinion. This way, many potential barriers can be minimised or avoided with ease.

Lastly, it is also important for employees to feel they are understood by management. This starts with showing empathy to each team member and understanding their challenges and desires. Acknowledge and building these into company values leads to faster self-actualisation for your team and overall boosted productivity.

3. Encourage responsibility

One of the strongest ways to deter underperformance is empowering your employees to be accountable for their actions and accepting responsibility. This extends to all areas of daily work from owning budget for a project, through to managing expectations for deliverables.

In some organisations there is a ‘they’ who are deemed responsible — a nameless, hidden person or group — and this scapegoating can foster a culture with a lack of responsibility. When a ‘blaming culture’ emerges, egos can come in the way of team harmony and overall productivity. This causes your company to move away from the values the team should be living and breathing.

When a team values true responsibility, each employee owns all of their actions, takes full responsibility and faces the consequences. When people take responsibility for their actions, the challenges and issues that arise can be addressed and solutions found. This is a value set all teams should embrace when thinking about building sustainable growth.

4. Measure success and improve

Once a specific action has been taken, it is worthwhile for both team leaders and employees to review the impact and results in terms of the organisation’s values. Ask these types of questions — how did the action impact the people involved? How did it impact the organisation? How does it affect the bigger picture?

Most importantly: How do we measure success? KPIs aren’t always quantitative, but you should still be measuring them either explicitly via a reporting dashboard or implicitly via check-ins.

Reviews can be formal or informal and any activities can be reviewed. When the people within a growing team are encouraged to reflect upon and analyze their particular actions and outcomes, it encourages an environment in which continued growth can occur at all levels at the same time, continually progressing the organization as a whole.

5. Be ready

The old motto of ‘Be Prepared’ may have been created for Boy Scouts, but its message is applicable to any business today.

More than ever before, business environments are changing rapidly and companies can be forced into positions where management has no choice but to take drastic and radical action. Covid-19 is a perfect example of the type of crisis faced by management and drastic measures that have to be made to save the company. Although it is important for employees to feel a sense of stability within the business, they should also be ready to handle change readily at any moment.

How well an organisation and its people adapt to change can be a strong measure of its long-term success. Those who can make the most of a changing environment are destined to perform well over time. Ensure your hiring process embraces self-starters, people who culturally align with your organisation but who have a track record dealing with adversity. These people will be the flag bearers of your mission and values when the going gets rough.