How we put our values first when building our team

This article follows Exciting/Flexible/Highly Paid — pick two and build a great nonprofit team (and keep them) which outlined some of the constraints for nonprofits hiring and how you can put together a great team even with these challenges.

We’ve already looked at the challenges faced by nonprofits when trying to hire talented people, particularly for tech roles. We also saw how you can identify which particular barriers you are working with and how to make the most of other attributes to balance them out.

Now we are going to look at the second big concept we use at The Developer Society to hire and retain brilliant people: a values based approach to hiring.

It starts with drive

One of the core values we have at The Developer Society is summed up brilliantly by Dan Pink in his book Drive. In short, Pink says that money and hierarchies are not motivators that can create long term satisfaction and success in a team. Carrots and sticks like performance related bonuses and angry bosses can get people to perform to a high-level in the short term but this is not sustainable.

Long term motivation, engagement and drive come from three key factors:

• Autonomy: the desire to be self-directed
• Mastery: the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us
• Purpose: the sense that what we do produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond ourselves

Put those three together and you end up with drive: motivation, high performance, and satisfaction.

Image via Lionel Valledon.

Internal to external

To use autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the values that guided our hiring, we needed to start internally. We believed that to attract and, crucially, keep great people we needed to embody these values with our existing team and then shout about them to the outside world.

We wanted to keep it simple: do things the right way and then talk about them without any spin. It’s much easier to paint an honest and accurate picture of how things are to prospective hires than to put together an impressive sounding front that you can’t then back up.

Putting AMP into practice

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose are guiding values for everything we do but here are some specific examples of how we used them in our hiring process.

Autonomy — the desire to be self-directed

1. We went from a centralised team working together in one room to a team spread out across the UK (and sometimes further afield!). This ability to work remotely (or as we prefer to say ‘distributed’) has allowed members of our team easily move — or just work from home if they prefer — and making this a key selling point when hiring allows us to hire great people who can’t or don’t want to live in a big city that we happen to be in.
2. Similarly, we decided to put an emphasis on flexibility in our hours. We have core times when our team works together but outside of that, people can be flexible and plan their day around childcare needs or other things they have going on. Making sure that we communicate this flexibility through our hiring materials has been a real advantage for us.
3. And when it comes to autonomy, having a very flat, co-operative management structure allows for a high degree of ownership over your own area of work. This doesn’t mean anyone can do anything they want of course but people typically have much more control over how they deliver. Proudly focusing on our co-op status and collaborative nature goes a long way to communicating this to potential new team members.

Mastery — the itch to keep improving at something that’s important to us

1. To make this an ongoing part of life at The Developer Society, we’ve encouraged people to change roles and take on new challenges in different technical positions. This is something we’ve made explicit during the hiring process, offering people to come to the team in one capacity but grow into other areas they might be interested in.
2. Not all careers need to progress in the same way. The traditional model is that if you’re good at what you do, you move ‘up’ by managing others in the same area and so on, until you hit failure. That doesn’t have to be the case and we’ve made a conscious effort to have a clear system of career and pay progression that rewards the value you bring to the team, not where you fall in a traditional organigram. And we even made our whole approach to pay publicly available and shared with all applicants.
3. We all want to get better at what we do. And it’s not always easy to find the time to do it, especially if you have childcare commitments outside of work. That’s why we’ve made learning time a regular and ongoing slot in our schedules to earmark time for everyone in the team to focus on upping their skills during the working day.

Purpose — the sense that what we do produces something transcendent or serves something meaningful beyond ourselves

1. We aim to promote our mission at every step. The ‘why’ of our work is crucial and we try to make that clear in everything we do. It’s easy to take it as written but you can’t emphasise enough the simple reason why you’re doing the things you do. Taking this outside of our team, our job descriptions, hiring notices, and other public material always leads with the big picture ‘why’ and only then ever moves on to the specifics of the role.
2. We try to live our values by creating as open and welcoming an environment as we possibly can. There are tons of little ways we go about this on a daily basis but one way that has been helpful in recruiting has been to ensure proper gender representation throughout our hiring process. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it (or won’t want to be it) and throughout our hiring process we ensure we represent the balanced and diverse team we are through representative interview and hiring panels and other means.
3. Another aspect of living our values comes from our open and fair approach to pay structures. These are in place for the whole team to understand (and rework as we want) and are also something we make available publicly through our pay structure (above) and pay principles.

How you can apply a values based approach to hiring

Values differ from organisation to organisation but there is a clear way to put in place a values based hiring system.

1. Identify the challenges you are facing and how they are affecting you (using the Iron Triangle or other)
2. Examine which values of your org are present in your structures and which are missing (for us this was about autonomy, mastery and purpose but for you it could volunteerism, creativity, equality…any values that go to the heart of your organisation)
3. Create the best possible context for the people who will be hired i.e. start by focusing on your current team
4. Then shout about the good stuff you’re doing

Values & hiring

Third sector organisations can attract brilliant talent but we need to be flexible and creative to do so in a competitive jobs market. If we embody our values in how we approach employment overall and then make that the foundation of how we do hiring we can not only start to be more attractive propositions for potential new joiners, we can also start to shift the debate about what employment should be about to terms that we believe in.

John Dunford is the CEO at The Developer Society, a not-for-profit digital agency, working with NGOs and groups with a progressive mission to help make the world we live in a better place.

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