A brief history of heycar values
written by Sydney Schienbein & Rebecca Schneider
With this article we, the People & Culture team of heycar, would like to reflect on our company value journey. We start with the development; how we tried to implement it in our culture; and end with the current status quo. It is not about best practices, but about sharing our experiences and learnings during our journey.
1) What are company values and why are they important?
Values are supposed to reflect a shared mindset within the company about how all team members want to work together. They can be interpreted as an attempt to put the culture of a company into words and can therefore create a framework for a mutual code of conduct.
Values can be an integral part of the employer branding strategy. This strategy aims at the internal and external positioning and development of the company as a trustworthy and desirable employer. Research shows that identification with the employer is among the three main reasons for an employee to join and remain with an organization (Hausknecht, Rodda & Howard; 2009). One way to strengthen employees’ identification with an employer is through the establishment of values.
2) So, how and where to start?
Managing directors usually have their own ideas for how they want their team to work; this was also the case with our MDs. They came up with their own suggestion of our company values, which were valid but did not represent the organic approach we wanted to adopt. Instead we involved the whole team by asking them about their preferences for collaboration.
Right after the official launch of our product we asked all our team members to sit down in their departmental groups and put their perception and ideas of our culture into a few sentences. The questions answered by each team member were:
· Why do you like working at heycar?
· What’s unique about us?
· How do you want to work with your colleagues?
But if you ask 30 people about their opinion, you will get 150 ideas. In order to structure this brainstorming phase each department selected a value ambassador who was tasked with representing their ideas.
We then held a meeting in which the value ambassadors aligned the vision of the MDs with the ideas of our whole team.
This workshop resulted in the definition of four core values (ownership, collaboration, innovation and diversity) and a set of sub-dimensions for each.
3) Our approach to implement our company values
We started promoting these values internally in a company strategy booklet that was handed out to everyone. But, of course, we were excited to show these results to the outside world too.
We created videos corresponding to our values for our careers page. In these videos our team members explained their understanding of our values, their associations with them and how we as a team embody them on a daily basis.
We decided not to give specific instructions to the team members which ensured their authenticity. Let’s be honest, no candidate in the history of mankind really enjoyed watching scripted company advertisements.
4) External Evaluation
We also evaluated these value videos together with a market research agency. The goal was to understand if external people (N=100) who were not familiar with heycar found the videos credible; the values appealing; and could imagine joining us as potential candidates. And they actually did! This once again showed us that values can be useful for attracting the right talent.
5) Internal Evaluation
Identification with the culture is not only important to attract new talent, but also keep them in the company. Because we were experiencing a massive growth phase, we wanted to ensure that not just potential new joiners, but also our existing team members identified with our values — which is why we decided to also evaluate them internally.
For this purpose, we developed a questionnaire which was divided into different sections.
First, we assessed how well known the four company values were among our employees.
In the second section, we asked about the relevance of the company values for every single team member — both in the application process as well as for personal goal achievement.
Furthermore, we were interested in whether the team feels the company values were sufficiently communicated — both in the application process and in daily business. Finally, we asked the team to assess on a 6-point scale how much heycar fosters each of the company values in the workplace.
The results showed that the majority of the participating team members (N=64) were familiar with the company values.
About 2/3 of them rated the values as being “relevant” or “very relevant” for achieving their personal goals. However, we cannot make any statement on the relevance in the application process, as about half of the participants stated that the company values were not sufficiently communicated and not presented prominently enough. This finding does not only apply to the application process, but also to the daily business at heycar.
All over, the questionnaire clearly showed that the company values are considered important and useful, but the lack of their visibility resulted in clear action points for us.
To make them more visible, we tried to create as many touchpoints with the values as possible. The initiatives include:
1. Promotion of the values in our employer branding profiles
2. Development of icons in close cooperation with our design team and the value ambassadors
3. Assessment of value fit during the interview process
4. Emphasis of the company values during the onboarding process
5. Adjustment of feedback sheets to allow both employees and supervisors to give feedback that explicitly refers to the company values
Our value journey doesn’t stop with the implementation of these initiatives but is rather an ongoing process that will never be finished. Ensuring that values reflect the actual company culture requires continuous evaluation and feedback from the team.
6) What’s next?
As we are continuously growing and entering several international markets, we need a strong vision for our heycar culture. Every team member, no matter in which country, needs to have a clear understanding what heycar stands for. The values can function as a stable basement for this purpose.
However, we want to keep an organic approach and ensure that values are not dictated to new markets. To achieve this, we need to set up a framework which allows them to preserve their individual and cultural characteristics.
Sounds tough, right? And it will be. But we take the ownership, we’ll collaborate to reach this goal while we try to find innovative ways that work best for our team and in the end, we will create an environment that reflects our brand’s uniqueness through our team’s diversity.
