Our journey how to become a value driven company

Thiemo Bubel
the-stepstone-group-tech-blog
5 min readAug 19, 2022
Our values are exposed in our cafeteria in our headquarter in Düsseldorf, Germany.

At StepStone our vision is “the right job for everyone” which we aim for both internally and externally. Internally, this means we create an atmosphere that enables our employees to do their job successfully and thus surpass themselves. But this is easier said than done.

As a company with nearly 4000 international employees, historical grown structures of around 25 years, additional acquisitions in different countries and the constant strive of our departments to perform better and better — the intention to become a value driven company, in regards of the conception, organizational and coordination efforts, looks like a nightmare to every Project/Programme Manager.

However, this week we had a reason to celebrate as we rolled out a big milestone to become a value driven company.

It all started in January 2022 when a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) assessment revealed we were lacking an understanding of who we are as an organization — what is our corporate culture? How do we work together?

Really? This assessment gave us something to think about. Is this really a topic to look at? StepStone as a company is doing very well. We perform, we collaborate, we are successful. But we did some investigations and found some great studies:

Sources: Deloitte (2012), Jobvite (2018), Forbes (2022), National Bureau of economic research (2020)

One of our first steps was to think about how we define this intention to become a value driven company. For us it means:

- Having a set of values which are unique to StepStone and which define who we are as a community of 4,000 people.

- Consistently mirroring our joint behavior and decisions over time back to our values.

- Aligning all our people processes from hire to retire, e.g. recruiting, onboarding and performance management.

We also realized that we do not need to start from the scratch. We already answered some important questions like our “Purpose” & “Vision”. These two points are essential to ensure that everyone understands “WHY we exist” and “Where we are going” (what we want to achieve). We also implemented our so called “Leadership principles” to ensure that our leaders drive the right behaviour of our employees to be successful. But these principles are not values at all.

To answer the question of “WHO are we”, hundreds of StepStoners, steered by our Executive Committee and Leadership Team, engaged in a value challenge: which are the values that best reflect our DNA as StepStone? There were surveys, workshops, brainstorming sessions and so on.

You can imagine that different departments, different countries, different parts of the company came up with quite some differences in their collection of values reflection.

In May 2022 during an offside Leadership Summit, we made sense of the input gathered from all corners of the globe and decided on our core set of values. Several breakout sessions, mind sharing exercises and fishbowl discussion, but also prioritization and voting sessions have reduced the numerous inputs to the essential commonalities of all our team members.

In the end our brand new 7 values strike a balance of who we are already and who we aspire to be. They glue together all of our efforts towards realizing our strategy and our vision.

As part of this process of defining the values and preparing for the launch, I personally have already learned a lot:

- Every company already has a culture and values associated with the people in the teams. The team members adopt the values that are exemplified by the leaders.

- Different countries, subsidiaries, parts of the company, departments and divisions can have different values. However, it is essential to find the commonalities and to transfer them into a common understanding.

- Values should NOT be imposed by the management. The more the employees are involved in the definition, the greater is the acceptance and also the confirmation of these values.

But my biggest learning so far: The integration of the values into the daily communication with colleagues and employees helps seriously to promote a culture that fosters a common understanding and common behaviour. Implementing values in our daily usage of your language sounds (again) easier said than done, but more on that later.

Having now our values in place is already a great success which is worth celebrating. And we celebrated all over the world in every office location we have in over 30 countries. All over the places the first reactions were brilliant. But we know as well that we are heading the biggest challenge at all as we need to implement these values in our daily business.

We have a plan and a lot of things already prepared, but I will share this second part of our journey to become a value driven company in another article.

But to give you a little sneak peak of our following highlevel milestones:

- Create Awareness: We embed our values into our communication channels

- Activation: We integrate our values into every step of the employee life cycle, e.g. recruiting, onboarding, perf. mgmt.

- Training & Engagement: We align our leadership development programs with our values and we include the values in our Employee Satisfaction survey to track progress made against them.

- Course correction: We evaluate how the journey is going and course-correct when needed, e.g. quarterly ExCo reviews on values.

Stay tuned for more details and our lessons learned out of these steps.

Read more about the technologies we use or take an inside look at our organisation & processes.
Interested in working at StepStone? Check out our careers page.

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