More than words: Creating meaningful company Values
Our experience writing values that go beyond buzzwords
This post was written from the perspective of Florence Brown, Bloom Works Head of Communications.
People of a certain age may recall an acoustic ballad from the 1990s called “More Than Words,” which was performed by the American rock band Extreme. The lyrics of the song can be summarized by the proverb, “actions speak louder than words” and can also be applied to the way companies should think about their organizational values.
In previous decades, companies created their corporate values in a predictable fashion: the leadership team hired consultants to walk them through formulaic processes that were probably created when “More Than Words” was on The Hot 100 list. Every few years those organizations might revisit the values because of leadership change or new strategic planning, but generally values were “written in stone” and printed on everything from water cooler signs to company badges.
Bloom Works isn’t an average company. As a small business operating in the public interest technology industry, Bloom has a number of unique attributes:
- Status as a public benefit company
- Technology company with a focus on serving civic organizations
- A fully remote team, geographically distributed throughout the country
- Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Human-centered work that challenges structures of power
As one of the newest members of the Bloom Works team, I had the privilege of joining the values writing team in November 2021. Bloom was already in a great position to codify new values because its first draft, written in 2019, had been created with a care and intent that clearly showed in its language. The first draft stated the following:
Bloom Works Values 1.0 (2019)
The best adventures start out as a spacewalk.
We embrace uncertainty and ambiguity since this is how things worth doing start — one step at a time, into the unknown.
Technology is for everyone.
We use technology to drive towards outcomes, not outputs, and strive for everyone to know how to build it, change it, and adapt it to withstand the future. We will prioritize the useful thing — even if it’s not tech — over something that integrates with your smartwatch.
Be humble. Show up ready to listen.
We are a team that shows up with our whole heart and whole brain. We learn from one another, from our clients, and users.
Bring your shovel.
We pride ourselves on being practical, pragmatic, scrappy, and determined to get the job done. We will do what it takes if it means it gets all of us to where we need to be.
Fiercely prioritize.
In recognizing at the outset that trying to do everything will mean accomplishing nothing, we strive to balance our work against our ability to do it well. We need to deliver, and deliver with quality.
As Bloom Works grew, so did its list of partners, clients and projects. By 2021, the Bloom Works team represented a new set of identities and perspectives that warranted another look at the values statement. During Bloom’s first company offsite retreat in September 2021, the team went through a brainstorming session with sticky notes and IRL discussion, resulting in what we lovingly referred to as the “chicken scratch” version of the new values:
Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer Emily Wright-Moore organized the sticky notes into rough categories while Bloom’s design team got to work researching peer best practices. The team looked through various websites from other companies, ranging from public interest tech to social impact design. After noting what these companies do well, they came up with several insights and recommendations:
- Integrate values into all aspects of the organization, including mission, approach, process, hiring practices, talent management, and client relationships
- Define values with intention and care
- It’s okay to be a work-in-progress
Following the research team’s synthesis, I teamed up with Bloom’s fantastic content strategist, Megan Zehnder. We continued distilling each category until we could create one and three word versions of each idea:
With simplified categories in hand, we collaborated on a shared doc to work through language nuances and gave our draft back to Lan Nguyen, Bloom’s rockstar Service Designer and Strategist. She compiled the values into a deck and led the Bloom team through a review of the entire process, along with a clear process for submitting feedback. After integrating edits, we published the Bloom Works values on the company About page:
Bloom Works Values 2.0 (Current)
- Lead with courage: Welcome ambiguity. Remember that challenging the status quo requires stepping into uncharted territory.
- Center the people: Seek an understanding of people’s lived experiences, and challenge systems that perpetuate inequities.
- Share the process: Cultivate mutual trust between peers, partners, and clients. Leave egos behind, and share findings.
- Adapt to challenges: Pursue excellence by being curious, determined, and willing to change plans. Make only new mistakes.
- Design for impact: Come with high expectations but be cognizant of constraints. Create processes that people can actually use and build on over time.
With the values written, the Bloom team has begun the messy and exciting phase of the process — learning how to integrate and live the values in our everyday work. Since the values were developed using the insights and motivations of current employees, we believe that our values will continue to evolve as new, dynamic members join the team.
Bloom has formed an employee committee to outline this framework for bringing our values to life, and they have begun weaving the values into key documents, like our interviewing process, job postings, onboarding processes and even our business development assets.
Founder Lauren Lockwood shared this thought as we discussed ways to adopt our values into everything we do:
“It feels like our values aren’t just nice words that we ask everyone to memorize or plop into documents. They are an organic extension of our team’s existing norms and values, and they give us a concise north star to build our culture with intention.”
