Bringing Your Values Out To Play: A Playbook on Company Values

By Debra Corey

Only one in four employees believe in and use their company values as they go about their work. And with company values being one of the most strategic business tools a company has, helping to shape and guide the behaviors and actions of their workforce, this just isn’t good enough!In this book, best-selling author and Human Resources thou

• Language: English
• Publisher: DebCo HR LTD
• Release date: Dec 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781916309647

Book preview

Bringing Your Values Out to Play

A Playbook on Company Values

Bringing Your Values Out to Play

A Playbook on Company Values

DEBRA COREY

Copyright © 2020 by Debra Corey

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any form of retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the publishers except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Power of Values

Chapter 2. Discovering Your Values

Chapter 3. Playing with Your Values

Chapter 4. Keeping Your Values Alive

Chapter 5. Leading from The Top

Chapter 6. Values in Action – The ‘Plays’

Addison Lee Group

Atlassian

Blue Lagoon Iceland

Brown-Forman

C Space

Charles Tyrwhitt

Credit Union Australia

The company

Their purpose/mission/vision

Their values

Discovering their values

Bringing their values out to play

Davita

Decathlon

Deloitte

Dishoom

Events DC

Giffgaff

ICC Sydney

IIH Nordic

Impraise

Inspired Villages

Kidzania London

Kp Snacks

Lego Group

Missguided

MOSL

NAHL Group Plc

NAV

Otsuka

Peoplecare

Propellernet

Purina U.K.

Radio Flyer

Ralph Trustees Ltd

Reward Gateway

St John Ambulance

Starred

TrustFord

Valor Hospitality

Venables Bell+ Partners

Virgin Atlantic

WD-4 0 Company

Zappos

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Debra and I first met in London, August 2015. I was CEO at Reward Gateway, the HR Tech Company, Debra had just completed a stint as Global Reward Director at Page Group and was about to publish her first book: Effective HR Communication.

We were at the Engagement Excellence conference in London. Debra was third up on the agenda with a presentation titled How to Communicate with Impact and I was in the audience. I had no idea who she was and the presentation title sounded pretty routine. But the RG sales team had recommended her to speak and were giddy with excitement to see her on stage. I wondered what they knew that I didn’t.

Within minutes of her walking on stage, I knew two things. Firstly, the sales team had unearthed an absolute treasure. Secondly, I absolutely had to hire her.

Bursting with energy, Debra owned the stage and electrified the room. She educated, inspired and joked with the audience of several hundred HR leaders. I’ve met a lot of conference speakers in my time and there are few who have Debra’s ability to connect so quickly and so deeply from that stage. We met for lunch the following Wednesday and two months later she joined my executive team.

Having a Group Reward Director of Debra’s experience and capability was complete overkill for my 400-person company – in previous roles she had looked after up to 200,000 people. But I wanted her to revolutionize our reward and benefit structures in just one day a week and spend the other four days working with clients and partnering with me in writing a book on employee engagement together. I wanted her to help me spread the message that good work environments can lead to great business results and develop our increasing knowledge and understanding of what makes great company cultures work.

For the next 3 years, we worked tirelessly together, side by side. Between us, we’ve visited hundreds of companies in dozens of countries. We listened, analysed, mapped, discussed and debated hundreds of company cultures. We’ve seen companies from every sector you can imagine and at every stage of growth. The smallest client we’ve worked with had 25 staff, the largest over 100,000.

Debra is one of the most engaging, warm and generous people you will ever meet. And this means people really open up to her. So, from those hundreds of client meetings, she got to learn all the gossip – all the ups and downs of what went on, all the things that never get written in the news release or on the intranet.

Her work with clients over these last four years has allowed her to develop from an HR Director, specialising in Reward, to one of the most experienced and knowledgeable practitioners in company culture and employee engagement that we have.

Debra is also a wonderful writer. I read her first book, Effective HR Communications as a pre-publication draft on a flight from Australia to Hong Kong. Even though I was tired when I boarded the plane, I never got to sleep. The book had me smiling from the first page and I couldn’t put it down. Quite something for a book about HR communications!

So yes, Debra is a consultant, yes, she’s a world-leading expert, yes, she’s a C-suite level corporate practitioner. But she’s not dry or staid, instead, she is warm, funny, humble and incredibly practically minded.

The data on employee engagement is stark – depending on where you live, around 60-70% of people are disengaged at work. Avoiding complex definitions, let’s say it like this: About 3 in 4 employees arrive at work thinking primarily about what time they can go home. Having strong and wisely chosen internal values that are deeply embedded in processes, procedures – the very fabric of an organisation is a key part of building a culture of high engagement. Debra and I learned that whilst writing our last book, Build it, together.

When researching Build it, we saw first-hand how companies with the best culture had a really strong sense of who they were and how their people should behave – they had effective values. That’s why this book is needed and as you can see from the disengagement statistics, it is needed urgently.

Importantly, this is not a book that will teach you complex models that you’ll never get to implement. It’s not a book that will bamboozle you with long words or strange concepts. And it’s not a book that will gather dust on the shelf.

Instead, it’s a book packed with practical tips and actionable examples. There are other books on company values that might tell you how to design them, but this book will tell you how to design, implement, polish and perfect them, doing so in Debra’s rebellious, but still practical way.

It will educate you on what is possible, equip you with tools to make the process possible and it will inspire you as to what is possible.

It’s been an honor working with Debra these last 4 years and I’ve been privileged to have seen this book in some of its early forms. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I have. And I hope most of all, you get to use it to make real, positive change in your own organization.

Glenn Elliott,

Author, Founder and Former CEO at Reward Gateway

Berlin, October 2019

You can’t stop the future. You can’t rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.

– Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

Introduction

Houston, we have a problem is probably the most famous sentence ever spoken in space, coming from the radio communications between the Apollo 13 crew and the NASA mission control center. I’d like to borrow this powerful phrase, because we, too, have a problem!

The problem is that although the majority of companies have published values, data from Gallup shows that only 27 percent of employees strongly believe in them, and only 23 percent of employees strongly agree they can apply their organization’s values to their work. That’s three out of four employees who don’t believe in and/or don’t use their company values as they go about their work, taking actions and making decisions that ultimately impact on the success of their company.

So why is this a problem? Why should it matter that values are not playing a role in how employees are working? To answer this, let’s go back to the Apollo 13 story, where the problem they faced was returning their astronauts safely to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded. They overcame horrific challenges to safely return their astronauts, achieving this happy ending because everyone at NASA worked together, doing so by not only understanding their values but applying them in every decision and action they made.

In this real-life situation, their values of being team-oriented: coming together to solve complex issues, being agile: working in ambiguous environments, and being resilient: not giving up, were ultimately the difference between life and death for their three astronauts! And, by the way, I’m absolutely confident that the values weren’t listed in a manual or hung up on the walls of the spacecraft – instead, they were intrinsic to each and every employee at NASA, in space and on the ground!

But surely this only happens in space travel; values can’t have such an important role to play in the normal business world. Wrong! Jim Collins and Jerry Porras conducted an extensive six-year research project which found that visionary and exceptional companies were all guided by a core ideology, core values and a sense of purpose that are beyond just making money. In Built to Last, they write that A deeply held core ideology gives a company both a strong sense of identity and thread of continuity that holds the organization together. They believed so much in the importance of values, that they are one of the six timeline fundamentals suggested to organizations in order to build their own visionary and successful company.

So, if values are strategic tools required of businesses, what can we do to make our employees understand and apply them? The answer is to start by admitting that the problem is actually not with our employees, but with us! The Gallup data clearly shows that the majority of companies:

Don’t have the right values, ones that truly describe and guide their workforce to achieve their mission, helping them understand what behaviors are to be applied in good times and in bad.

Don’t fully operationalize our values, embedding and weaving them into everything they do, being so much a part of how they operate that even if they were nowhere in sight, their employees would know, believe in, and live them in their behaviors and actions.

If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values— it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.

– Brené Brown, researcher and author, Dare to Lead

But all is not lost, for there are ways to overcome these problems. Over my 20 plus years as a Human Resources Leader and now as a writer, speaker and consultant, I’ve worked at, or have met companies who are getting it right. They’re changing the statistics at their company and achieving their mission and purpose through their people applying and living their values.

And this is exactly why I’ve written this book, to share the tips, tools and stories I’ve lived, learned or collected from others through my research and consulting, so that every company can benefit from the power of values, using them as an integral part of their wider engagement strategy. Do this, and you’ll have an engaged workforce that uses your strategic values to guide them to achieve your mission . . . even if you have a challenge like they did on Apollo 13!

Getting Started

Before you begin your values journey, which is a term I’ll use throughout the book to signify that you’ll be taking many small and big steps to get to your destination, let me share a few things about the book to help you and get you on your way:

You don’t have to read the book front to back.

Although the order of the chapters is somewhat sequential, you certainly don’t need to follow them in numerical order. Depending on where you are in your values journey and processes, feel free to dip into chapters (and plays) at different times and for different reasons. In fact, I hope you use it this way to refer to and inspire you not just once, but whenever the need may arise.

Use the book as a playbook.

This book is not a textbook, it is not a reference book, it is a playbook.

This means that just as a sports playbook includes strategies and approaches to get things done, this book is packed with a variety of approaches, techniques and tips to help you get things done. Use it like a playbook – scribble in it, draw in it, rip pages out of it, have fun with it!

Be inspired by the plays.

This book, like my last book, is jam-packed with stories, or what I call plays. They are intended to inspire and inform you by sharing how other companies have discovered, embedded and live their values. I absolutely loved interviewing all of the companies, and I’m certain you’ll love reading the plays, walking away with tons of ideas.

Go out and play with your values.

The title of this book, and the concept of playing with your values came to me partly because of my approach to sharing stories through my plays, and partly through reading Nikki Gatenby’s book, Superengaged , where she has a section header saying Bring your values out to play. This concept resonates with me, and hopefully with you, for playing is such a powerful and effective way to learn and grow. If we can bring this into the workplace when it comes to our values, think of the magic that will happen!

As Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher and writer, once said, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So, with that being said, let’s take our first step together!

Chapter 1. The Power of Values

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

What values are and how they can be defined.

Why values are valuable.

Introduction

In this chapter, I’ll be answering two key questions – what are values, and why are they so important and so darn powerful? I’m confident that many, if not all of you, already know the answers to these questions, but I wanted to quickly cover them for two reasons:

So that we all are on the same page on these basic but important concepts.

So that when you’re asked these questions from business leaders or from your workforce, you’ll have something you can cut and paste to do so – my gift to you!

What are values?

Let’s start from the beginning by answering the question, what are values? Put simply, values are a set of words and explanatory sentences or paragraphs that state or suggest behaviors that the company has in some way decided are valuable, unique and important to them.

Or as Jim Collins and Jerry Porras say in their book, Built to Last, values are "the organization’s essential and enduring tenets – a small set of timeliness guiding principles that require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and are important to those inside the organization."

Why are values . . . valuable?

To answer the question of why values are valuable, let me start by once again referencing Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, and the research they did over a six-year period and wrote about in their book, Built to Last. They show that the biggest and most successful, durable and sustainable companies all had a single thing in common that transcended their CEO, their products and even their markets, which was a strongly embedded sense of who they were, which comes from their purpose and their values.

Building on from this, here are four other reasons I’ve seen (and felt) as to why values can and should be important to your organization:

1. They define who you are.

Values define who you are as a business, what you stand for (and against), and what you are willing to fight for. This is important because it tells potential and existing employees and customers what you believe in and how you’ll behave, clearly defining this upfront in a meaningful way. And in this competitive world, the better we can do this through our values, the better chance we have of standing out from our competitors and attracting and retaining talent and customers.

2. They guide decisions and actions.

Values act as guidelines, guiding principles, and/or guideposts to your employees, helping them make everyday operational and strategic decisions, even when leaders are not around. When used properly, employees use them to ask questions such as, what do my values say about this? and how can my values help me choose a path and make a decision? This is important at all times, but especially in bad or challenging ones, where values provide the focus and guidance we need to persevere.

Values are needed as principles that guide our behavior while we’re scaling the mountain we set to climb.

– Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge, Helping People Win at Work.

A great example of an employee using their values on the spot to guide decision-making was told to me by Troels Wendelbo, Senior HR Director at LEGO Group.

The story took place at a LEGO Group store in London, England, when a customer came in looking for a