Alongside your vision, mission, purpose and hopefully some kind of strategy you will most likely have some organisational values. These define what is important to you as an organisation. They describe what you stand for and underline the kinds of things that you believe in.
Before you read on, do you know what yours are? Do you know where to find them? Go and take a look!
They may be standing out loud and proud on all your website, on all your social media platforms and be an integral part of your day to day. Or they may be sitting quietly in the corner somewhere, hidden in a folder, something you need to hunt for when asked.
Define your organisational values
Working out what your organisational values are in the first place takes time. You don’t just dream them up out of nowhere and will need to invest some time and energy deciding what these may be. This is all part of your organisational development and may be part of a larger piece of work. There are a few different elements to getting to your organisational values just where you want them:
- Take into account your overall strategy and vision, what it is you do, and what it is you want to be known for. Your values will need to align with what you do. This will involve asking a key question such as “what are the values that will show what our organisation stands for?”.
- Decide who is involved in creating the organisational values. A collaborative process will get your staff teams on board and help them to own the values. But inviting too many people to contribute may mean you have too many ideas to work with. This is where an organisational development facilitator may be able to help – bringing in the right voices, in the right way to ensure you get what you need.
- Articulate your organisational values well. These will need to be written in a meaningful way, in language that reflects who you are and in a way that everyone in your organisation can understand. Beautifully crafted words that don’t actually mean anything won’t really help you.
Help your team to know and understand the organisational values
Once you have defined your organisational values, share them with your team members so they know what they are, and help them to actually live those values. If you have take a collaborative approach to creating and defining your organisational values in the first place, then half of this work is already taken care of. Those that took part in outlining the organisational values will know very well what they are.
But you will need to plan how you are going to get others on board so the values are known and understood. Help your team members to reflect upon and add meaning to the values. Give them an opportunity to consider what they will mean for the work that they actually do. Share the rationale behind the organisational values and why this is important for the work they do. If one of your values is “authenticity” – what does that actually mean in the context of the work that the team members within your organisation actually do?
Organisational values only do their job if they mean something to the people working towards them and living them.
Live your organisational values
Perhaps then the most important part of having organisational values is ensuring everyone is living them. You don’t want them to be just some words on a coffee cup that no one feels attached to. Don’t just tell people what they are supposed to do. Involve people in creating some plans to define and adopt the behaviours that are behind the values. Some important questions here are:
- What do you expect to see from your team members when they are living these values?
- What does these behaviours look like?
- What actions do we need to take?
- How are you going to know when you are living the values you have defined?
These kinds of questions need to be asked up and down and staff teams. They are not just for the people on the ground to adopt, but for the CEO and Directors to get on board with too. If you are asking your team members to embrace the organisational values, then everyone in the organisation needs to do the same.
Keep your organisational values up to date
The last thing to think about is checking in on your values and making sure they are still what you need them to be. Nothing stands still. Just as your plans and strategies and team members change so too may your values. Even if you think you are the same organisation doing the same thing, with the same core beliefs, take time to check these still stand true.
If you need help creating and embedding your organisational values, get in touch! We will help you define your values and involve your team so they can actually live them. Talk to us about how organisational development facilitation can help.
Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
