How we worked out what our real company values are
Communication
Respect
Integrity
Excellence
These aren’t our values. They are Enron’s. Anyone can write anything down and call it ‘Our Values’.
In summer 2018, we tried to write our values down. Before then there didn’t seem like there was much point, given that we hadn’t even worked out what product we were building. But once we had worked that out (kind of), we were growing our adoption rapidly, and we had been through 9 months of pivoting without losing a team member, it felt like the right time to capture something about the way we work.
Working them out
I did a quick Google of company values at larger tech firms (lots of examples here). They all sounded sensible…we wanted to be all of those things. But we also knew that valuing everything is a lot like valuing nothing. We figured the best way forward was to work out our values from scratch.
We didn’t want to dictate our values to the team, we didn’t want to make them hopelessly generic and we didn’t want to pretend to be something we’re not. We wanted the whole team involved and no distractions, so we booked in a two-hour session at our 2018 team retreat in the Cotswolds.
To understand what our values are, we gave everyone a stack of post-it notes and asked them to write down answers to
Why do we work well together?
and
Why do I enjoy coming to work?
We ended up with 15 groups of post-it notes, and tried to write more concise descriptions for each.
The long list
This does a pretty good job of summing up how we work, but there is literally no point having 15 values as it’s just too long a list to do anything with. Consolidating them is tricky with a big group of people, so we took this away to work on, and trimmed it down to 10. This was relatively straightforward, as we were able to merge similar values. For example, we saw having an Inclusive culture as part of Balance.
The short list
But 10 is still way way too many to think about on a day-to-day basis. Everyone in the team needs to be able to recall them in an instant. We need to be able to interview for them in 45 minutes. We need to be able to fit them on our careers page, and include them as part of our progression framework.
The hardest bit of the whole process was trimming down to a list of just 5 values. It’s agonising removing things that we know we value, but all that matters is what we value the most. So we trimmed it down to 5 by identifying higher-level themes. For example Being responsible and Taking pride, merged into Responsible ownership.
Our values
These have worked really well, because they describe how we actually work, rather than what we might aspire to. For every single one, we have a list of examples of how we exhibit that value, and they’ve become really helpful guidelines for making decisions. Having them written down also makes it a lot easier for the team to challenge each other — I’ve been asked why I send emails at midnight if we value Balance… (it’s safe to say I don’t do this anymore).
I’m sure they’ll need updating over the coming years, but for now they work well (and you can see some examples of how we exhibit them in our handbook).
Where these have been most helpful is in forming our values interview — blog post on that to follow…
