When leaders and teams are aligned around the core principles that guide how a business should grow and impact the world, daily work is more efficient, fulfilling, and fun. And, ideally, that shared commitment creates a culture that helps folks feel engaged and empowered.
But while the idea of building a culture around values is awesome, it’s not always clear how companies actually make this happen. Is there a secret formula? Not so much. Developing a culture that reflects your company values is about intentional work over time, requiring regular review as you grow.
So where to start? In the ongoing pursuit of building a values-aligned culture at Help Scout, a few key learnings have proven particularly helpful. Read on for four steps we’ve taken to define, share, and live our values.
1. Clarify your values
“Core values” are not a universal, shared set of principles guiding businesses — they are unique to each company, and the work to form and articulate them is the job of leaders and teams. If you haven’t yet clarified the values that you want to guide your business and created statements that describe each one, that’s the first step in creating a culture that then aligns with those values.
If you’re starting from square one, key questions to ask to help define your values could include:
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What do we stand for?
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What behaviors do we value over all else?
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How will we work to achieve our mission and vision?
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How do we treat members of our own organization and community?
Once you’ve landed on the values you feel should define your work and your culture, you’ll want to hone those principles using language and tone that are authentic to your brand. At Help Scout, a recent project to refresh and clarify our values included these steps:
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Set a timeline: We planned for this work to be completed over roughly four months. To ensure we met our goal, we set milestones and specific dates to solicit feedback as well as a target date for socializing the newly clarified values with the entire team.
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Identify a leader: Since the values refresh was a brand initiative, Help Scout’s VP of brand, Kristen Bryant Smith, took ownership of the project.
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Form a working group to provide early feedback: With Kristen in place to head up the project, we created a working group of four to six other Help Scout leaders and team members to contribute to the process.
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Create cross-functional focus groups: We wanted to be sure that our refreshed values reflected the voices and experiences of our global team and that the language we used was inclusive and not overly colloquial. As part of our refresh process, we held focus groups that reflected our team’s diversity based on role, tenure, geography, race, and gender.
2. Share them with the team
If you’ve done the important work of developing and honing your values, the next step in building a culture that is aligned with those values is to make sure all team members know what they are.
Whether you’re revealing new core values for the first time or you’ve revised or refreshed existing core values, presenting them to your entire team at once is an opportunity to bring folks together and impact culture in a powerful way. At Help Scout, we chose to share our refreshed values at our all-company retreat in Tulum, Mexico. The opening session provided a venue to present the values and the process of the refresh, field questions, and engage in dialogue around the work.
Once you’ve shared your core values internally, another essential step is documenting and publishing them in an easy-to-access internal doc, available to the entire team. You might also choose to create an external site page that names and describes your company values.
No matter where you choose to publish your values, keep in mind that it’s not a one-and-done exercise. If you want your team to continually rally around these principles and keep values top-of-mind, consider these other ways to highlight values in your culture:
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Link to your shared values doc or site page regularly in internal communications.
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Share values teamwide throughout the year during all-company and smaller team meetings.
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Recognize employees who exemplify values (via internal communication channels and team-wide gatherings).
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Incorporate values into your performance review processes to illustrate how team members can represent values in their daily work and prioritize them in longer-term contributions.
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Don’t miss the chance to create cultural alignment around values early on. Introducing company values in job descriptions and reviewing them during new employees’ onboarding are two opportunities to help ensure folks are aligned with the company’s values from the start.
Operationalizing and consistently sharing your values with your team and the world will help embed them in your culture and affirm their role in guiding behavior and strategy. The more clearly you can articulate your values to prospective and current employees, the more likely you are to ensure that team members join and stay because they share your values.