Transcription
One of the most important parts of a brand identity is company values. In fact for some companies, such as professional services firms, where the only thing you sell is people’s time, I would argue that your organisational values are maybe even the single most important aspect of the brand.
That probably explains why the vast majority of companies now have documented values. Great. But how many actually have mechanisms for embedding them into their organisational DNA? In my experience, almost none. They get trotted out during the interview phase and then tucked away again and that’s it. What’s the point of that??
If we all agree that every company really needs organisational values then surely we can also all agree that those values must be reinforced in all sorts of ways?
So here are a few ways in which you can actually turn those values from the abstract into practice:
– A monthly meeting – if your values are important, then surely they’re important enough to have a quick meeting every fortnight or every month where you have each person provide an update on something that relates to each value. So if being a great communicator is an important value, why not go round the room and have each person state which clients they’ve met or spoken to over the phone since the last meeting?
– Reviews – when you perform reviews, why not organise them by value?
Most importantly, pay – why not offer everyone a small increase to their basic that they’ll receive when they are consitently displaying each value?
Now of course there are a thousand different ways you could go about doing this, so the point of this video is not to say that these are the ways, but just that you need to have something, otherwise those values are literally not worth the paper they’re written on.
See you next time.
