This is a guest post written for by Stuart Britton, CEO of SEC Recruitment.
Every business should have values. We all know that. Values that articulate who a business are, what the business does, how the business behaves, and most companies do. Some create them internally through engagement of staff, others will talk to an external consultancy (and sometimes spend a small fortune in doing so!) to get support. There are many different routes to take before you get to that end point of developing values, much thinking to be done and people in your business to consult, not to mention customers and any other stakeholders. But when you have developed, refined, are happy that your chosen values are all that embody your brand and you’ve rolled them out to all of the world, how do you ensure your business does live it’s values?
I would challenge any business, of any size, to repeatedly step back and ask itself one question:
“Do we ACTUALLY live our own values?”
Do you take what you say as the core essence of your organisation and drive those values both internally and externally?
Your company values are not just words on a website and they shouldn’t be an extra slide on your client PowerPoint or RFI document. They are who you are and that has to be demonstrated across the entire business, starting with the leader of the organisation, CEO, MD or business owner.
It’s not just the senior level person who is often the face of the business, it’s also the business partners, the shareholders, through the senior management team, down to the operational and support staff. In fact, it is those people who are on the ‘front line’ of the business – talking to customers every day – who are the most important. They will be spending most of the time talking to your customers and if they are living the values and believing those values, then your customers will most certainly be aware of them.
You need your customer to believe that you live by your values, because your values can be a key selling point for your business and if your customers know you truly live by them, then your business will prosper as a result.
As the CEO of SEC, I strongly believe in the values that we have – trust, honesty, integrity and commitment. When somebody joins our business I make sure that right from the start I personally run a ‘living our values’ session with every member of the team. I do this to demonstrate how we live our values and most importantly, give people the power to question what is being asked of them, if they feel that something they are doing doesn’t sit within our values. Our values were created by our people, not the senior management team, or the marketing department, but the people who are representing the business to stakeholders.
It is really important for me that I give everyone within my business the trust – the unfiltered, conflict trust – that they are allowed to question something that they don’t feel lives up to our values. These are the values they have helped to create and we all need to embody them.
Now, that might be an understanding of the values, an interpretation of our values but generally it’s not. It’s a, “I feel uncomfortable about my values and the company’s values by performing that task”, question that they need to ask when performing any job asked of them.
If somebody feels uncomfortable in a business they are not going to perform their job to the best of their ability which is why I take a personal interest in making sure that everyone understands the values. It’s so they see that right at the top of the organisation we take who we are seriously.
It really isn’t just words on a website. I encourage every business to take a look at its own values and challenge itself to asking whether its people truly believe them. Are the values easy to remember? Do you have too many? How do you share with them – your people, clients, candidates and employers – about your values? Can they explain them to a stranger?
These are all questions that a business should answer. If you can answer all of those questions with a positive outcome then living the values should come naturally to your business.
But what do you think? What do you think are the key challenges in ensuring that your people live their own values? How do you live your values? I’d be really interested to know.
