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The values of my company are useful in guiding people’s behaviour

Submitted by David Taylor on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 10:51.
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Submitted by Robinsonhall on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 11:22.

This method of declaring corporate values is being used both to reaffirm those values with the public while also promoting them to all staff within the organisation.  Some values are simply common sense while others are aspirational, however the Exec Team has invested time getting (or at least attempting to get) this right.

Working within an NHS environment, staff are by far "our greatest asset" hence the need to ensure they know and understand this.  While it may appear cliched it remains a valuable concept.

Submitted by magd36 on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 12:47.

The driver for this type of activity seems to be more tuned to obtaining a specific accreditation (i.e. TSxxxx states

companies should have a mission statement e.t.c.).

Real worth is demonstrated by a company acting in the manner these words state as oppossed to simply

placing them in a policy or plastering them to a wall.

My child knows about my values through my actions not through posters on her wall informing her.

That aside it's always a good thing to surround  ourselves with positive things.

Submitted by Steve on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 12:50.

I have found that publicly declared values are very important for new people joining our organisation so that they can start to understand our culture. They are also very helpful in holding people, at all levels in the organisation, to account for their behaviour.

We have a combination of obvious and non-obvious values - omitting the obvious ones would make the values set look incomplete whilst omitting the non-obvious ones is wrong for, hopefully, obvious reasons.

Our published values have only been in place for about 2 years. During their creation (which I led) it was surprising how much time was spent by the senior team discussing whether 'honesty' should be included. They feared, I believe, in being caught out at some point in the future. Perhaps this alone gives us enough reason to put it in there!

Submitted by Lewis Hulatt on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 13:00.

When I am particularly offended about the conduct of some firm or organisation, my first port of call is their website, which almost unfailingly contains 'values' or 'promises'.     I often proceed to quote such verbiage to the site owner in my complaint and – guess what – they almost never assert how they have applied those values to the situation in question.   It is Humpty-Dumpty territory – those words mean as little or as much as that organisation wants them to mean – for example, the Legal Services Commission on its website, boasts about the Quality Mark – supposedly a distillation of all that is good in legal service providers – to quote the LSC:

“Quality Mark is the name given to a set of quality assurance standards for legal service providers.  The standards are designed to ensure that a service is well run and has its own quality control mechanisms that assure the quality of the information or advice provided. The Quality Mark enables members of the public who are in need of legal advice and other help to receive a quality assured service. “
 
I was looking into a case had been badly handled and discovered that unqualified and unsupervised staff carried out the legal work in what was, even to an experienced solicitor, a complex case.   The Legal Complaints Service investigated and compiled a dossier running to tens of pages of failures, yet when the matter came to be reviewed by a Judge, he said to the client "What can you expect on legal aid?"
I came across another firm who had literally nobody (not even a trainee) available to advise the legal aid clients taken on by them.   Their clients were confused, as would be expected.
 
People with vested interests collude in the pretence that such systemic failures are isolated incidents. Those proclaimed values and quality standards are for the most part mere flummery.   Would anybody say that the core values of their business were ‘dishonesty, incompetence and exploitation’?   Exactly.
Submitted by Mike Sturrock on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 13:46.

I work for an airline and our values are posted in the lobby.. The first one is "Safety First, no compromises" which I guess you'd be glad to hear if you fly with us, and we regularly use it as a touchstone to check that what we are doing is in line with that value.

Also, I've just been at a board meeting pitching for cash to develop a new way of working in the airports. I referenced another of our values, "Innovation, finding new ways of doing things" as aligning with what I was proposing. The cash was signed off and passengers are going to see improvements in their progress through the airport when I've delivered the solution.

So, I think corporate values are important and relevant, if they are indeed relevant. If our company had a value such as "Continuity through tradition" then my pitch may not have worked, and quite rightly so, but the values reflect what we're actually doing and the way we behave and therefore form a valid touchstone.

Submitted by Tony T on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 14:11.

I work for a large company employing over 15,000 people and we jumped on the values bandwagon about 5 years ago - we are now on our 3rd set of values by which we must all live or die.  I can't help thinking that "values" are not just another money spinning gimmick dreamt up by HR/management consultants.

Stage 1 - tell client that "everyone" else in their sector has done it or is just about to

Stage 2 - have meetings and workshops to identify values

Stage 3 - Roll out  values to employees

Stage 4 - Ask client how he intends to monitor that values are being adhered to

Stage 5 - More meetings and workshops

Stage 6 - Roll out updated employee appraisal process that now centres on values and the behaviours that have been identified to show that values are being adhered to

Stage 7 - Ask client how they know if their values are up to date

Stage 8 - Carry out benchmarking process - discuss with client

Stage 9 - Go back to stage 2...

Meanwhile Fred in production who was banging out 8,000 widgets a year when he started at the company 10 years ago is now only banging out 7,900 widgets a year - as he now has to take time out for his appraisals and to gather behavioural evidence from his colleagues to show that he lives by the company's values (3rd edition).....  

Submitted by magd36 on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 14:16.

Made me smile......

Submitted by Lewis Hulatt on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 14:35.

...but when he gets roped in to sit on the Values Task Force, his production will drop to 6,500, but at least everybody will know that his widgets were made in a value-compliant manner.

Submitted by Tony T on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 16:13.

Poor Fred - he has also been nominated to sit on the Cultural Diversity Commitee .....

Submitted by magd36 on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 09:34.

The accounts manager has been asked to act as the independent third party on Fred's disciplinary hearing.

He's never done this before so he needs to go on the disciplinary workshop first.

Unfortunately this falls at month end so......

company values remain in tact but reporting company value may be a little late this month.

Submitted by Lewis Hulatt on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 09:48.

As a result in the delay to month-end figures being made available, the accounts manager at the regional office of Bigfatbonusbank Plc decided to suspend WidgetCo's overdraft facility.   An order for 90,000 widgets came in two days ago, but WidgetCo now have difficulty ordering the components, due to their credit issue which has made the supplier nervous and now insists on WidgetCo adhering to the strict terms of payment, which had previously been loosely applied, as WidgetCo had never defaulted on payment, even if occasionally late.  It is a written policy at ComponentsRus Ltd that customers with credit problems will not be supplied, other than on a cash basis.  Sorry, but it is a written policy and it would take the policy committee to consider any variation. 

The FD has been warned that she faces disciplinary action if she doesn't sort it out 'yesterday'.   Fred jokingly offers to sit in as colleague to the FD, but she glares at him icily.

Jim, Saeed and Brian have finished the previous widget order and are asking why the components for the next job have not been delivered.

Submitted by Clive Barrett on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 19:26.

The above posts make a nonsense of a company having values. I have friend who work in banks and they too have a set of values that are a complete waste of time.

Thou must have meetings three times a day to discuss the previous meeting and so forth. Utter tosh. And, meanwhile, poor old Fred is making less and less widgets and the company is less productive. Farcical.

Submitted by Tony T on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 11:33.
If having decided that your organisation wants to go with the concept of having values, one of the problems is coming up with values that will mean something to everyone in your organisation.  In large organisations with people working in just about every department that you can think of this can be an issue.  Our company came up with very customer focused based values and whilst our customer facing employees may have been able to relate to the values - our non customer facing people were struggling.  The company's solution to this was that all employees had to "pretend" that they had customers,  So if Fred asked Annie for a box of widget spares, Fred became Annie's customer; if Umar in finance ran a monthly widget cost report for Annie - Annie was Umar's customer and so on.
 
The reason for this pretence was that the company's values had not only been embedded in the company's project/cash sign off processes they were also now a core part of the company's appraisal, payrise and bonus schemes. 
 
Did this mean that everyone truly knew what the company's values meant, with everyone living and breathing the values?  Unfortunately not, the whole thing basically descended into a game of bullshit bingo.  If someone wanted additional cash for a project/product/promotion/payrise everyone made sure that their pitch made reference someway, somehow and several times per PowerPoint slide to the company's values.   As for the appraisal process; people had to seek feedback on how their behaviours demonstrated that they were living the values.  So Annie would ask Fred for values based behaviour feedback - and Fred would always give Annie great feedback as they were good friends; not only that but Annie was at times a customer of Fred's - so Fred asked Annie for feedback too and so on.
 
I think we have gone too far!
Submitted by Lewis Hulatt on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 11:51.

So - anecdotally at least - there is a strong strain of opinion that suggests that people regard the announcement of Values and their incorporation into processes as being largely counter-productive and cause BS to spread through an organisation like farmyard slurry.

The natural common-sense of the situation would be

Fred - "I want to make good widgets"

Jim - "We need components to make widgets."

Sasha - "I can sell good widgets easier than poor ones"

Brian - "The marginal cost of production of decent widgets compared to poor ones is negligible, providing we work well"

Gill - "It is easier to do the accounts, if I don't have to devise unnecesary procedures.   I spend at least a day each month filling in forms for the Widget Marketing Board and the Widget Retail Consortium."

WidgetCo - "We want to be profitable selling widgets"

Bigfatbonusbank - "We value our customers - it says so in our mission statement.    We borrow at 0.75% and lend to customers like WidgetCo at 9%.  Then charge an 'arrangement fee' for doing so.  It would be difficult not to make money as a bank...."  

 

Submitted by David Taylor on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 18:09.

Thank you for all of the above - these comments all tell me three things, 1 - If companies do have declared values they had better behave by them with customers, 2 - Values being published internally sometimes work, and sometimes don't, and that seems to be more around what else the leadership in the company does to promote them and 3 - I am definitely going to make Naked Leader Week more controversial this year! And if any of you would like to write one, just let us know. David

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