4 Steps To Rework Your Company Values & How To Go Beyond Performative Standards
The ‘value’ of values
If you want to build or maintain a strong company culture, your company values should serve as the foundation — or compass — for that culture. Those values are a set of guiding principles, beliefs and expectations that:
- Impact the team’s collaboration and behaviour
- Help you hire the right people for your team and culture
- Set expectations around decision-making
In our case, our company culture is the #1 reason people stay at Laterpay.
If you don’t have any company values yet, it’s probably time to set them up. If you already have them defined, you should still plan on revisiting them on a regular basis.
In this article I’ll walk you through how we did that and how you go beyond performative standards and actually get your team to live your values.
Our original values
I personally believe that Laterpay’s original set of values were great! They clearly demonstrated what is important to us as a company and they also did a lot for our culture.
- Trust & Ownership
We believe that everyone takes ownership of their work and trust people to see it through to completion. - User Focus
We are building Laterpay for users first. - Collaboration
We want to provide valuable solutions for real market needs. We work together internally and externally with our partners to deliver the best products and results for users. - Transparency
We’re open, honest, and empathetic, and we proactively communicate with each other. This is vital for how we work, it enables us to quickly reach business objectives, and it contributes to a healthy company. - Respect & Inclusion
We embrace, promote, and support the diversity of our team and believe we’re a better company because of it.
So, why revisit our values?
If our values worked so well for us, why rework them? As it turns out, we had two compelling reasons for this:
- We set up the above values in 2017 and hadn’t adjusted them since. That’s an awfully long time without iterating on something so important!
- We’re in the process of changing our technology and our market focus with the latest evolution of Laterpay. We felt that this made it a great time for us to look back and adjust our values based on what we’ve learned over the years and on how our priorities have changed.
4 steps we took to rework our company values
Before sharing our new values (which we’re very proud of!), let me tell you a little bit about how we got to them.
1. Company Pulse
We initiated a company-wide survey asking the team the following questions about our values:
- “Without looking them up, do you know what the Laterpay Values are?”
Results:
15% answered “Yes”,
75% answered “Kind of?”, and
10% answered “No”. - “What values would you describe Laterpay by today?”
Results — top 3:
85% answered diversity, inclusion, respect
53% answered ownership, trust
46% answered transparency, honesty - “What values would you want Laterpay to be described by?”
Results — top 3:
50% answered diversity, inclusion, respect
50% answered transparency, honesty
42% answered ownership, trust, accountability
2. Input from our senior management team
We talked to our management team to understand their views on our current values and what they felt might be missing. This also included our CTO and Engineering Managers who recently set up our “Engineering Principles” — a set of standards specifically for our engineering team that complements our original values was a great source of input for the update.
3. Workshop!
With all of this, we had gathered a bunch of great information, feedback, and resources. Now it was time to put it all together. Jenny (Head of Operations) and I grouped our values, expectations and behaviours on a whiteboard and after an hour, we arrived at five values with their own expected behaviours.
We made sure to focus on actions or behaviours over concepts. Our original Laterpay values were concepts that needed their own accompanying sentences to clarify what we meant, such as “ownership” or “collaboration.” Our goal for the new values was to word them as actions or behaviours, so that they are clearer and do not require additional explanation.
4. Share and iterate
Once our values were enthusiastically approved by our senior management team, we shared them with the rest of the team. The team provided some more feedback, which we incorporated — et voila, our new values were born!
Our updated values
You can read our new values here. The VALUES themselves are in bold capital letters and below them are examples of related behaviours and expectations:
- BE FEARLESS. BE ENTREPRENEURIAL.
Fail forward. Be innovative. Work iteratively. Remove sources of fear for others. Push forward. - SIMPLIFY THINGS.
Strive for excellence, but perfection is the enemy of good. Make our customers’ lives easier. Be pragmatic. Work smarter not faster. - OWN YOUR DECISIONS, YOUR SUCCESSES, YOUR MISTAKES.
Take responsibility and accountability. See your work through to completion . Ask for help if needed. - ENJOY AND CONTRIBUTE TO DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION.
Actively contribute to D&I. Never stop learning. Change is good, embrace it. Gain new perspectives. Respect each other. - WORK AS A TEAM. TRUST EACH OTHER.
Use humor. Be humble. Disagree and commit. Be transparent by default. Trust by default.
Beyond performative values
Great, so we’ve got revised values that we’re super proud of, but that can’t be where our efforts stop. Next we have to make sure that they’re not just performative values, but that we actually live them and keep building our culture around them. We are lucky that we’ve already put a lot of effort into living by these standards, so we’re not starting from scratch. However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to keep investing effort into our values and our culture.
Here are some things that we were already doing to hold ourselves accountable for living our values:
- Talk about our values during onboarding (and even during hiring!).
- Make values part of the 360 review process.
- Link continuous feedback to values (we’ve definitely still got some work to do there, but we’re trying!).
- Set defined expectations for behaviours.
- Train feedback skills through workshops. Feedback keeps us headed in the right direction.
- Management leads by example.
- Draft interview questions that relate to our values.
And we plan to do more than that. We will send out a company-wide survey to ask the team how they demonstrate the company values in Laterpay. This creates a behaviour baseline from which we can then assess what training is needed. Then we can train the specific skills to remove the mystery of how values look and show up at Laterpay.
We’d love to hear about how you reworked/plan to rework your company values! If you have any questions, drop them here or connect with me on LinkedIn.
