Company values

Most large organisations have a set of half a dozen values. Airbus, for example, has a pretty typical set:

Values serve a variety of purposes, some public facing, some internal facing.

On the one hand they are part of an organisation’s public brand. They present a concise summary to customers and potential recruits of what the organisation stands for (or at least what it tells them it stands for). This role is increasingly important; millennials and the generations that are following them are more concerned with values than their predecessors were.

At the same time, values are also often an attempt to define or to document internal culture. Sometimes they lay out the founder’s vision, other times they are crowd-sourced internally – everyone picks some values and then they’re paired off against each other like it’s the ethics world cup. If a company has been diagnosed with a malaise then management (or management consultants) may prescribe a new set of values to invigorate the staff.

Most values are meaningless and worthless. Meaningless because they are too often generic adjectives which, when lacking any explanation of how they are embodied in this specific context, mean all things to all people. Worthless because they do not serve their purpose.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Values can be useful tools which help organisations (and individuals) to make decisions and strengthen their culture.

Existence precedes essence

Classical philosophy was obsessed with identifying the ‘essence’ of things. Plato conceived of a ‘world of forms’ where the ideal, essential form of a tree, a cat, a vase, and so on existed. All real trees and cats and vases were rough copies of these ideals and less important as a result. Essence was the key thing, existence was a secondary consideration.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, existentialist philosophers inverted this formula. Sartre wrote that ‘existence precedes essence’:

man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards

So it is with organisations and their values. Values are not the fundamental essence from which an organisation is formed, instead they are extracted from the already formed entity.

Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals, a technology company, and author of several books about work puts it like this:

Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of how it is, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be.

Values must be lived to be real and effective. That is not to say that they cannot also be somewhat aspirational, but you should be able to point to at least half a dozen concrete examples of the value in action.

Talk is cheap

In evolutionary biology there is a hypothesis called the ‘costly signalling theory’. A healthy peacock shows potential mates how healthy and desirable it is by expending its resources the costly signals of a luscious tail. Costly signals are reliable because they cannot be easily faked; only a truly healthy bird could have a luscious tail. By contrast, saying ‘I am a very healthy peacock’ is a cheap signal and can be said (or at least squawked) by both healthy and unhealthy peacocks alike.

So too with companies. Saying ‘our company values diversity’ is a cheap signal. Forgoing profit to paying women the same amount as men is a costly one. The Gender Pay Gap Bot on Twitter highlights the cheap talk of organisations who are keen to show off their diversity credentials whilst permitting yawning gender pay gaps. Similarly, a value of ‘integrity’ with ‘zero tolerance on unethical and non-compliant actions’ did not stop Airbus from engaging in bribery and corruption that led to a $4bn fine in 2020.

It is easy to create a set of values when you are in Plato’s world of forms, bathed in idealism and detached from the cold practicalities of reality.

The true value of having values comes when you reach a fork in the road and a decision must be made. This is when your values can act as a guide as to which path to take. It is also in these moments of conflict that your professed values are put to the test and will either be burnished as truth or crumble to dust as meaningless platitudes. Do you choose integrity or succumb like Airbus to the siren call of profit?

Sometimes values are in conflict with each other, and that is okay. Values are tools for making decisions, not decisions themselves. There is no value or mantra that should be followed to its extreme. Our whole society is necessarily a constantly shifting trade-off of individualism and collectivism, privacy and security, costs and benefits, all in relentless tension with each.

Defining your values

If you do not yet have a set of values, then consider creating one. As well as helping you make decisions, values can be used to build and reinforce team culture. It is hard to stick to your values when you do not have them written down and there is no agreement about what they are. They are both descriptive and prescriptive, describing the culture you have, and helping you keep that culture intact through changes.

You should have a minimum of three and a maximum of six values. Enough to give a well-rounded description of your organisation, but not so many that you can’t remember them all.

Start by describing the best bits of the culture that exists within your organisation. It is much easier to get buy-in for values that people are already embodying than it is to prescribe new ones. There are various online lists of pleasing adjectives that you can consult for inspiration, but be careful to use them only as a prompt and not as a menu.

Each value should be summarised by a single word or sentence, but don’t stop there. Write 50-100 words about the value, how it applies to your organisation, and how you live it. Good values are ones people remember, relate to, and can see being lived.

Avoid values like ‘respect’ that form the bare minimum expectation of any workplace. They can easily become the corporate equivalent of someone saying that they are ‘drama free’ – a flashing neon sign that they are absolutely not drama free and you should steer well clear. This is especially important if these values are going to be public, because values are an opportunity to highlight what distinguishes you from your competitors.

Consider the difficult decisions that you face or expect to face in the future where a clear set of values might come in handy. If for example you have plans for rapid expansion, then tensions between meeting growth targets and maintaining integrity likely lie ahead.

An example

A great example of these principles in action comes from Public Digital, a digital consultancy. They have published a set of ‘positions’ – ‘values expressed in action and outcomes’. These are opinionated stances that set them apart from other organisations. For example, one position is:

Working at scale is the best way to make that positive difference. We work with presidents, prime ministers and CEOs because they influence large budgets and large organisations. Focusing on the biggest problems will have the greatest impact for the largest number of people.

You may agree or disagree with this position, but you at least know where Public Digital stand and what to expect if you work with or for them. These positions also help Public Digital make decisions:

One of the reasons for doing this is to help us navigate who we partner with and who we work with. Given the nature of the work we do and the size of our ambition there are no simple or easy answers here. So we have also created criteria to help us evaluate new opportunities and an Ethics & Risk committee to discuss borderline cases.

Values should evolve

Values are not static things. They evolve as organisations change, people leave and join, and social mores change. Review your values every five years or so.

You may find that, on review, your lived values are different from your written ones. You then have a choice between changing your values and changing your culture. Bear in mind that the former is a lot easier than the latter.

Resist the urge to replace all your values wholesale. Instead pick one to replace (or to add if you like all your current ones and have fewer than six) and think carefully about how to bring about the change that will introduce that will help your organisation live that new value.

Use your values as tools

To turn your values from a superficial PR exercise into something embedded in everyday actions, you must use them. Do not listen to the school of thought that says that the more a value is plastered on walls and slides and lanyards, the more true it must be.

Bring them up in discussions, use them like Public Digital has to create criteria for evaluating opportunities, and call them out when they’re being used by others (but in a natural way – avoid the uncanny valley of mandatory fun). Use them as a gentle stick in conversation to nudge people towards behaviour that is more in line with the culture you’re aiming for – ‘I’m not sure that would be very in keeping with our value of transparency’.

Don’t be a cargo cultist. Don’t have values because everyone else has them, have them for a purpose, and use them to serve that purpose. A good set of values is extremely valuable.

J. Dudley