Building Company Values from the Ground up!
Upon interviewing with a company and eventually joining one, you tend to hear a lot about their “values” — — what they stand for internally, what they look for externally, and how they impact your job daily.
But where do these values come from? Were they created by the founders on a whiteboard at 3 AM over a bottle of wine and a couple of espresso shots? Or were they created by an HR consulting firm and look like they were copy-pasted from a conglomerates website? Or were they created by a team of thoughtful, passionate, opinionated coworkers on a mission to change the world of banking one product at a time?
As Head of People & Culture at Arival, creating our company values was one of my number one milestones in my first quarter. My co-founders agreed with me that our growth was dependent on having culture alignment in the office, but also on how Arival recruits and identifies a candidate’s values that align with our own. Creating values with a group of diverse and strong personalities of our initial 13 team members was no easy feat. Read on for an inside look, step by step, at how we achieved this. The good, the frustrating, and ultimately, the final product, which I must say, I am quite proud of!
Gathering employees in a room and having a good old fashioned whiteboard session, dwindling ideas one democratic raise of hands at a time, is often useful and leads to a successful culture. But with this bunch, it wasn’t that easy. And although we finished the two-hour session with some keywords and a small sense of direction, we were far from done. Here’s how it played out.
The directions were simple: the one-word icebreaker game, which, like its name suggests, doesn’t need much explanation. Break the meeting or training session participants into small groups of four or five people. Ask them a very simple question — e.g., “What one word would you use to describe our company culture?” — and give each team five or 10 minutes to come up with their answers. Before finalizing their one word, teams will have rigorous discussions among themselves. Then it’s time to ask each team to share their answers with the rest of the group — facilitating even more discussion.
The first lesson learned — — Don’t create expectations when it comes to building values. Just start with a simple session and see where it takes you. You are never wasting time gathering a group of colleagues to discuss words and value types that mean something to you. We learned a lot about each other that day and left the meeting with the beginnings of a theme we continued to play off of overtime.
Here are some of the words that were debated and made it to the top 20:
After a week away from the whiteboard, I sent my teammates some new instructions:
Prepare 2–4 sentences describing how you want Arival’s culture to be. A mission statement of sorts that explains the culture of Arival to the outside world and internally describes who we are at work and in your own life. We want our culture to reflect the best of what we bring to the table individually and as a team. If you prefer, you can bring 2–4 short phrases, like the example here: https://jobs.jobvite.com/zappos/p/why#/values. Thanks, Zappos!
Feel free to use a combination of these descriptive words below, some of us chose as a team two weeks ago. But no pressure if you feel these words don’t fit into your mission statement. If anything, they can be an inspiration.
This exercise wound up being a massive success! People poured their hearts out and exercised their creative writing skills. Not to mention, having their own time and personal space to create their “perfect vision” for Arival, as well as having a sample of words from the previous week to ignite their ideas, proved to be the perfect round two!
In addition to the exercises above, my co-founder came up with a fantastic idea to make our core employees go a little deeper. When you force people to create a set of “workplace” values, they can come off a little stale in that they seem too “corporate” or too “buttoned-up”. When you force your colleagues to think about themselves and how they live their lives and operate internally daily outside of work, you can find some great core truths to utilize in your company values. What’s the point of having your teammates live under one set of standards at the office and another set at home? Why not intertwine them? I sent the team the below directions to do just that!
I need you to answer these two questions, please refer to these two articles for inspiration.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-do-you-stand-for-6cdcf280312d
https://www.success.com/5-reflective-questions-to-discover-who-you-are-and-what-you-want/
1. Who are YOU?
2. What do YOU ultimately stand for?
Please give these some thought. Although they are short questions, they are not meant to be easy or short answers. My virtual door is always open should you have any questions.
My biggest failure. I compiled all the “keywords”, “mission statements”, and “personal reflections” and separated them by common themes/categories. I then put them all in a Survey Monkey and had the team privately vote on their favorites per category. I intended to tabulate the scores and present the team with the “winning” values. Upon sharing the top choices with the group, it was clear that voting on stand alpine values set in stone wasn’t satisfying, fair, or productive. The truth is everyone had diamonds in the rough throughout their written exercises. I knew there was a beautiful quilt of material in there, it just needed some structuring, sewing, and editing.
I announced to the team, “we are scratching the voted values, give me a week, and I will show you what I think might be better!”.
Now it was time to sew!
For a solid week, my co-founder and I wore out a google doc, sharing, editing, commenting, and moving around a little piece of everyone’s heartfelt expressions. We separated the core values into themes, and chapters much like a book. We added a prologue, an epilogue, pictures, and the final piece, a declaration of signatures of the original 13 employees who all participated. The manifesto became a living document, there forever for all new hires to study. We also made a vow that this manifesto of values would forever adapt and change to our needs. The foundation we laid together over the course of 6 weeks, creating, debating, testing these values was a worthy exercise, one that I will never forget!
Check out our full Manifesto here!
Looking for a career change and want to be part of an amazing culture? Look no further!
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