[Messy notes] Four essential criteria for effective company values
Are your company values just posters on the walls or core behaviors and tools that drive your strategy?
At Miro, we treat our culture as a product. That means evolving, iterating, experimenting, gathering data, and releasing new versions.
What does it actually mean in practice?
I started to write this post as a reflection on our last year's values re-design project. And got into a perfectionist trap: too many things to share, the structure is not solid enough, the story is not full/engaging/practical bla-bla-bla. You know that voice that prevents you from hitting the “publish” button, don’t you? It always gets in the way. But we’ve got an antidote: quick and dirty prototyping.
So I decided to practice one of our values — Learn, Grow and Drive Change — and start with an MVP, a minimum viable product version of my soon-to-be comprehensive guide on (re)designing company values. That’s why I tag the series of my MVP posts as “messy notes”. Welcome to the world of #iteration!
Minimum criteria for effective company values
So, why did we decide to update Miro values in 2020? Are there any criteria to evaluate, whether your values are good or need some re-design?
We are constantly looking at the feedback & data in 4 dimensions:
1. Are values useful?
Do we really use them in everyday life for decision-making, do they help us move forward and achieve our company goals?
As an example, one piece of data we are looking at — how many times we use values to recognize great work and give positive feedback, especially peer feedback. At Miro, we use integrated Slack and Lattice for sharing peer praise publicly. This data is easily accessible through Lattice: how many pieces of positive feedback were given? What values were tagged in those posts? What are more or less used values in the given period?
With the previous version, one of our values was used less than others, and that triggered a new round of discovery and iteration.
2. Are values easy to remember?
If we can’t remember them, we probably can’t use them either.
It can be about the number of values, or about the way they are worded. Or it connects back to the first criteria on usage: do we use some values less because they are hard to recall when needed? Or do we remember some of our values less because we don’t use them enough?
We found that 2 out of 6 values are way easier to recall for mironeers.
3. Are values clear?
We accumulate feedback and see if any of the values create more confusion than inspiration and clear expectation. If we start to interpret one value differently, it’s a good sign we are not aligned on what we mean by it. In our case, 2 out of 6 values started to create more confusion than guidance, and it was another trigger to look closely at the meaning and wording.
One of the most interesting signals for us was to find one of our values was the top-1 easy to remember and top-1 unclear. If we remember something and we are not sure what it means, where it might lead us in the long term?
4. Are they relevant?
Are they (still) true to our DNA? Have we evolved in a way that it’s time to review our values too? Links back to the question around memorability too: are they harder to remember because we don’t see enough real-life examples of values-based behaviors?
Another lens on relevance to consider— how values align with our Mission, strategic goals, long-term priorities? Is there something important in our behavior that we consider essential to our future success but it’s not mentioned in the values? Work with your Leadership Team to identify those triggers during the strategic planning.
Where to look for signal/data
Semi-annual engagement surveys provide great insight into what we can improve in the current version.
Dedicated surveys could be run once we have one or few major hypotheses to test. In our case, we did a special survey as a pre-work to the annual Summer Offsite where we launched the values re-design process. It was important for us to validate a hypothesis that we formulated based on ongoing data and feedback.
Also, there are people processes where values are deeply integrated. In our case, it was hiring and feedback — insights from using values in those processes also signaled us there are some values that are less clear and relevant than others.
I’d say there is no universal timeline. I’d say it’s good to do a big review every 2–3 years, at least with our pace of growth it was a meaningful timeline. Yet the small tweaks in language and upgrading the values-based tools that optimize for clarity, memorability, utility, and relevance could be ongoing.
And if we see any of the 4 signals consistently show up earlier, we can initiate an iteration on a new version earlier.
This is the first chapter of Anya’s Messy Notes on (re)designing company values. I have a long list of learnings about the overall process, facilitation mechanics for values design workshops, examples of how to test & validate the versions, and how to measure the impact of the values.
Let’s co-create the series together? What questions do you have about designing and re-designing company values?
