Defining organisational values — some practical tips for startups
There is no one best way to go about defining your organisational values. Some companies bring in expensive help. For others the founder just writes down what is important to her. I created the approach below as part of my work with Poli — based on my experience helping companies do this well. Since then I’ve shared my approach with a few startup founders and Heads of People, who seemed to find it useful, so I thought I’d share more widely.
I think this approach has the right balance of rigour and pragmatism for a startup setting. It will make you think, but it won’t take too much time or money.
SCOPE — you can do this in a meeting
Make you that you have good enough answers to these questions:
- What job are your organisational values going to be doing? (e.g. internal vs external communication, change vs preserving what you have)
- Is defining organisational values the best way to achieve this?
- How will you evaluate success?
You may well decide after this session that working on your values just isn’t going to be useful to you right now. That’s totally ok.
DESIGN — it is best to nominate someone to lead this (probably Head of People if you have one)
You don’t need to invest a lot of time to make progress on this. Get to a decent draft, and start using it.
- Collect views*. What are your individual values and how aligned are they? Interviews and focus groups would be the Rolls Royce version, but in a startup you can do this by email. See below for a template I have used previously at Poli.
- Synthesise views. What are the themes, areas of agreement and disagreement?
- Review and formalise. Present the data in a meeting, discuss, and don’t leave until you have wording you are happy with. (5/6 is a good number. Fewer and they can be so broad they don’t mean anything. More and people can’t remember them. But there isn’t really a right answer here: if you can make them make sense to people, and have them guide behaviour, that the number isn’t so important.)
*At this stage focus on your leaders. In a very small startup this might be everyone. But, if you have more than 10 people everyone is too many — you’ll be making a lot of work for yourself with diminishing returns.
Click here for the full email text
EMBED — Share what you have come up with, and what it means
- Share with the wider team (if you have one). An “all hands” style meeting works well for this. On the agenda would be:
- Share the values, and some of the logic that got you there (starting with what the values are for)
- Get some feedback. Keep it at the “how does these feel” level. Redrafting to keep everyone happy will not keep everyone happy. How do these chime with each individual’s own values? How do they support/challenge the organisational culture?
- Contracting. How will you use these values? What should people do if they see colleagues acting against the values?
- Link to behaviour.If it is helpful you can also start building out some examples of the sorts of behaviours that support the values, and the sort that don’t. This can be useful if people are starting to interpret values in different and/or unhelpful ways. - Publish. Where and how you publish depends on the purpose of the values. But remember what you publish is less important than how you act.
- Use. Consciously use the values in how you make and explain decisions. Here is an example of this from Poli.
REVIEW AND ITERATE
Here are three questions you need to ask yourselves at least every 12 months:
- Are the values still personally important to us?
- Are the values useful to us — do they help us succeed in our aims?
- How well are we doing in relation to these values?
You might even knock together a survey in Surveymonkey or Google Forms so you can collect data anonymously. If you have more sophisticated feedback gathering mechanisms (employee engagement for instance) you might build review of values in this.
THANKS
Thanks to Carolin Fleissner (@ Wayve), Craig Winterton (@ Scape Technologies) and Sally Baines (@ OVO Energy) for sharing their experiences and giving feedback.