7 Best Practices to Embed Values

Having made the effort to establish the behaviours that are right for your organisation do you just put them on a mouse mat or posters and leave it there? Will that make everyone behave the way you want them to? Not likely...So here are seven best practices to make them come alive and business as usual.

1. Build the foundations
Make sure the needs of stakeholders are understood and linked through the vision and values
2. Define a strong vision
The vision should be clear, memorable, motivating, ambitious, customer related and translated into measurable strategies. Everyone need to be clear on the direction of travel, so write the vision for the staff not for the website.

3. Define strong values
Values should support the vision, based on key factors for success and turned into measurable practices. To be honest 9 is too many - people never remember them all. 3 to 5? And to be relevant to the type of people you need as well as the vision. One of our clients has recruited, quite rightly, several employees straight from academia; very bright people with no experience of working to deadlines or in teams therefore values that articulate what's need right now for the business makes it clear for employees.

4. Communication
Consistent communication by actions, signals and words. Walk the talk. Lead by example. Include values in the state of the nation address and monthly meetings.
5. Embedding

...in recruitment, training, performance discussions, rewards, promotion. Say what you mean, mean what you say.

6. Branding
Both the company brand and the employer brand express vision and values.

7. Measurement
Implement rigorous measurement of the effectiveness of vision and values. Take care; you get what you measure and too much measuring drives people crazy. Focus.

We have a lot of experience in supporting companies in defining their vales and how to embed them. Give us a call. 07766 753930.