Company values are important. Or at least they can be, if your employees know what they are and are committed to working by them.
A lot of companies have values but don’t spend a lot of time promoting them, reinforcing them or holding people accountable for living up to them. Do you know your company’s values off the top of your head? Does your company even have values? If you’re not sure, you may want to look into it.
We recently gave our agency values an overhaul with this in mind. Because it’s not enough for a company to merely document how it expects employees to work. There must also be operational cues in place to facilitate adoption. What’s the point of having values if no one knows what they are?
An Evolution in Motion
A few years back, Motion Owner Kim Eberl worked with an internal team to establish a baseline set of values here at Motion. Ten values were adopted soon after to help guide us in how we work. And though, in and of themselves, they were all great values, there were simply too many of them for most people to remember.
This year, we took a closer look at our values and, lo and behold, saw some similarities between them—or, put another way, opportunities to consolidate. And in consolidating them we also saw an opportunity to make them more ownable and more memorable. All good steps toward making our agency values more meaningful and effective.
FINDING the “FORCE”
After narrowing our set of agency values from 10 to five, we began brainstorming ways to make them more impactful. From the outset, we wanted to make the values easier to remember, so we explored the use of acronyms as a mechanism to aid in recall.
Many acronyms we mused on early in the process sounded like obscure labor unions or fictional crime syndicates. None of them seemed to fit who are as an organization, so we pushed on. What we really needed was a word that complemented our agency’s name and brand essence: Motion, a results-obsessed agency with a relentless drive to push our clients forward.
When we reordered and reworded our values to create the word FORCE, we knew we were finally onto something.
On its own, the word “force” communicates a lot. It’s energy. It’s propulsion. It’s movement. It’s strength in action. And it’s an internal drive that motivates us to perform at our best. We’re all forces in our own right. Forces of nature. And when we all come together, we are, of course, a workforce. For a company named Motion, FORCE” felt perfect.
We loved how there was so much story packed into the word itself—even before deconstructing it as an acronym, which looks like this:
Forthright
Open-minded
Resilient
Challenge-hungry
Entrepreneurial
Having identified the specific words we felt were reflective of our core values, we dug a little deeper and better defined each one of them, briefly, to make them more meaningful. Here are the Motion agency’s evolved company values in their entirety.
Be FORTHRIGHT
Work with integrity. Keep promises, build bonds and remain forthright in all that you do. Be honest, sincere and transparent, treating clients and coworkers with respect and as you would want to be treated.
Be OPEN-MINDED
Listen carefully and engage thoughtfully with everyone you meet. Never rush to judge. Consider the thoughts and feelings of others before you speak or act. Treat diversity of perspective as if it were an agency superpower.
Be RESILIENT
Stretch, bend and be willing to jump in new directions. Approach challenges with a growth mindset. Be nimble—receptive to changing things we can and resilient in overcoming those we can’t.
Be CHALLENGE-HUNGRY
Strive to perform at your personal best. Push yourself and those around you to bring maximum effort and fresh thinking to bear on every project you touch. Don’t accept the status quo. Seek better ways to do what we do, challenging clients and colleagues to stand apart and rise above.
Be ENTREPRENEURIAL
Be a self-starter. Take the initiative. Roll up your sleeves. Hustle. Identify opportunities to exceed expectations and run with them. Anyone can lead, and everyone has the potential to open new doors to success. Don’t wait to be told; be proactive. Grab a hold of those reins and go.
Turning Values into a FORCE of Habit
Armed with evolved values, the next step was bringing them alive for the entire agency, so we formally unveiled them at an agency-wide Town Hall. We explained the purpose of company values, in general terms, why they’re important to Motion and how employees can use them to work more confidently in their various roles. Beyond simply stating them, we encouraged people to actively adopt them as part of their everyday work routines.
To get the Town Hall started, we asked everyone to jot down from memory all ten of our current agency values. As predicted, few people were able to recall even half of them. It was the perfect icebreaker because it underscored the point to the undertaking. Challenge established, we introduced a solution: Five words in the form of an easy-to-remember, brand-friendly acronym.
Each of our five new values was then described and colored in with examples to help crystalize the kinds of everyday workplace behaviors we’d like to see. And then we gave everyone a glimpse of where these new values would live. Our intranet. Our company website. Our annual review materials. Our annual employee awards. We even had some branded swag to hand out: pleather-bound journals for taking notes with agency values printed on a card inside.
In the days following, a large-format custom-designed mural was applied to a wall near our main entrance, bringing our values to life in vibrant art, now a permanent part of our environment. As the Town Hall concluded, we asked everyone in the room to write down the NEW values from memory—if they could—which they had little trouble doing.
It’s our hope and expectation that the overhaul gives our values a more prominent place in our day-to-day dealings with our clients and one another.
How to Develop and Promote Company Values
Perhaps you already have an established and well-communicated set of values but feel it may be time for an update. Or, maybe you’re looking at establishing values for the very first time. In either case, here are a few tips for establishing and operationalizing company values to maximize company-wide impact:
1. Keep the number manageable.
People like to say, “the more the merrier,” but that’s definitely not the case when it comes to values. If you want people to remember them and live up to them, keep it simple.
Think about it this way: What if your agency had just one value—what would it be? Once you have that, add a second. What would it be if you could have just two values? What if you could only have three? There’s no magic number, but intuitively, the fewer there are to remember, the greater the chances your people will remember them.
2. Make them inclusive.
Values should be aspirational—something people want to live up to. With this in mind, consider values that everyone can get behind, no matter where they fit within your organization, from the leadership tier down to the worker bees. If they’re broad enough, people will be able to embrace them regardless of their role.
3. Make them as unique to your business as you can.
The beautiful thing about language is that there are numerous ways to nuance something simply by using a different word. Try to find words, or perhaps even an acronym, as we did, that fit naturally within your company’s larger organizational story. They’ll be more authentic and ownable, giving people a sense they are part of something special.
4. Make them easy to remember.
This is critical, as the best values in the world will mean little unless there are mechanisms in place to keep them top of mind. The acronym is one such mechanism. Keeping them short and sweet is another strategy. Finding unique terms and expressions can help. Even inventing a word and giving it meaning can be an effective way to promote recall.
5. Integrate them with your operations.
It’s not enough to simply have values; you have to promote them. Find ways to integrate them as part of normal operations. Bake them into reviews. Put them on walls. Make them part of the onboarding process. Build them into your email signature. Post them on your website. Print them on business cards. Find ways to keep your values visible so people don’t just know what they are but are reminded to use them.
6. Celebrate those who live up to them.
One of the best ways to encourage adoption is to reward people who exhibit desired behavior. In this case, have leadership on the lookout for people embracing your company’s values and recognize them for it publicly—perhaps even with a spot bonus of some kind. As people see their colleagues celebrated for living up the company’s values, they’ll understand just how important it is to the company that people are rising to the standards that have been set.
Company values can be extremely valuable, if your employees know what they are and are committed to working by them. Their impact can be felt across an organization in the service of better communication, improved expectations, greater employee satisfaction, higher productivity, and improved retention. Because when people understand, clearly, how they are expected to work, they’ll work with greater confidence and move forward in the light of the path you so thoughtfully established.
