Pretty much every office you walk into these days seems to have a mural of words on the walls. Things like: integrity, customer first, transparency and creativity.
Company values are starting to feel almost too fashionable these days, yet values are a key part of a company’s DNA and its brand, and always have been. They differentiate your business, should inspire great behaviours, and align your team and future hires around specific actions in order to be to the company you want to be, and achieve the goals and vision you aim to reach.
But some nice plaques on your walls are simply not enough when it comes to values. In fact, I suspect most of the companies involved in some of the biggest corporate scandals affecting various sectors and institutions over recent years did in fact have ‘values’. So what went wrong?
Sadly, they were just words on paper or on the walls. From hiring and training to performance reviews and how you manage people and work together, values and their corresponding behaviours need to be embedded in all that you do as you hold yourselves and each other accountable for living and breathing these ideals.
More importantly, it’s not just a one-time exercise. Embedding is continuous - behaviours need to be established and constantly reinforced.
You should continuously listen and get feedback in order to quickly identify if things go off course. There are many forces that can, in fact, weaken a great culture. Every growing business risks hiring the wrong people, communication challenges grow as you have more staff and more locations, and M&A or international growth can bring different company and national cultures into play. Old practices and processes may no longer be fit for purpose. Clarity of strategy, vision and values may blur.
So, how do you go about continually embedding once you’ve defined the values and behaviours you aspire your organisation to have? Here are some suggestions:
1. Map out your employee and customer journey
Map out your employee journeys and customer journeys (and other key stakeholders as applicable) to identify various touchpoints and focus on key processes and practices where you can reinforce values and behaviours.
For example, in the recruitment process, how do you evaluate whether or not potential employees exhibit the values or behaviours you wish to hire for?
Interviews should include situational questions which help to assess required behaviours or demonstrate examples of living specific values. A former COO of Coca-Cola I know interviewed potential candidates in restaurants outside of the office. The whole concept was designed to see how they treat the waiter or waitress. He said you can see more about their values than by sitting in an office.
On paper, a candidate might seem like the perfect person, but you need to understand how he or she will interact and set the example for a team of 1,000.
What sort of guidelines do you give your call centre team? How do you go about showcasing this? Continually educating, training and giving specific examples of expected behaviours and actions is key.