Story of Our Corporate Values
How we made our Corporate Values fun and relatable
Up! Up! Up!” The entire hall chanted that at the top of their lungs, mocking the team playing “Helium Stick” — an act that is deceptively simple in theory but incredibly difficult in practice. I smiled at the happy realization that the team had to check their egos at the door — senior manager was as engrossed as the fresh grad who had joined two weeks ago in balancing the stick — in order to achieve their goal.
I recalled the day when we were handed the daunting task of making the Corporate Values fun and relatable. While the company was founded in 2012 with values such as “Innovation” and “Collaboration” at its core, doubling of its size and revenue every year for the last 5 years made it imperative that we encode and showcase the values in a way that makes it easy for every VenDian to live and breathe them.
We broke the project into four manageable chunks.
First, we converted nouns and adjectives to phrases. For example, “Innovation” became “We Innovate Relentlessly”, and “Customer Service” became “Our Customers Mean the World to Us”. Phrases were descriptive and conveyed the gist of each value without the need for reading its long description, and honestly more fun to read than boring (and often repetitive) nouns or adjectives that we find in so many companies’ values today.
Second, we wanted to depict each value with rich illustration¹ making full use of our brand’s color palette. Each drawing had to convey the gist of the corresponding value in a subtle but in no ambiguous terms. What’s more, each icon had to fit in different contexts — such as printed material, mobile screens, and wall frames to name a few. Thought process and illustration that went into designing each icon warrant a separate blog post, but for now it suffices to say that the final outcome truly shows the design prowess we have in-house.
Third, in order for us to showcase the values to the world, we wanted to make a video that captured the essence of each value, while containing very few spoken words. Thus, “We Do the Right Thing” was depicted with help of a “Superhero”, and cleaning the beach in Karachi set the scene for “We Want to Make the World a Better Place”. While we speak of the value before each video segment, the scene that follows the value intro has no spoken words at all — you must watch “We are Awesome & We Know it” segment to witness it first hand!
Fourth, we had to “unveil” the values to a team of a few hundred, in a subtle yet inspiring fashion — the very theme we had kept throughout the project. The Grand Reveal — as we called it — was not to be some mundane conference with senior management giving large rounds of speeches; it had to be all action and fun, and the team had to come out of the event having internalized each of the seven values. Hence started a set of activities, each cleverly designed to reflect and emphasize a particular value.
Depicting doing the right thing in the video was hard enough, but designing an activity around it was no mean feat either. We had teams play “Matching Mania”, a scenario based card game with two solutions to each ethical dilemma, whereby everyone’s moral wisdom was to put to test as they chose the “right thing” for every scenario.
Next up was the “Marshmallow Challenge” whereby each team was given spaghetti and marshmallows. Most assumed this was perhaps a food contest! True, the standard utility of a spaghetti or marshmallow is satiating hunger, but give those two to engineers and designers and see what innovative structures emerge out of them. Those majestic towers made out of spaghetti sticks joined through a set of marshmallows were a sublime validation of how “We Innovate Relentlessly”.
While a few of us couldn’t resist to grab on to a few left over marshmallows — and who could blame them — the rest prepared for the “Minefield” game: One member of each team was blindfolded while their team guided them through an array of obstacles. This activity not only uncovered some serious team bonding and camaraderie, but also instilled the realization that we can dare to dream big and we do it together.
After the athletic and nerve-wrecking drill of jumping obstacles, it was time to put our minds to work. Teams were given incomplete words and sentences, which when guessed properly translated to quotes such as “Right or wrong, the customer is always right”. It was a delight to see folks from different functions — engineering, design, business, and project management for example — all eagerly doing their bit to guess the quotes. If the sheer enthusiasm is something to gauge by — it was evident that everyone understood how customers mean the world to us.
While we all are busy innovating relentlessly and keeping our customers happy, it is easy to lose sight of the responsibility we have towards our society and communities we live in. Therefore, in the next activity each team was asked to present a proposal on how we can make the world a better place.
To top off all activities, we asked each team to craft a photo-booth just with an easel, paints and glitter and in only fifteen minutes. To say the least, each photo-booth was a gem in its own right and our colleagues flocked to take their selfies in their team’s photo-booth but also in the ones that stood out from the rest! We didn’t have to tell the teams they were awesome and they knew it!
As the sun set behind serene and lush green hills of Naran², we did the Grand Reveal: the Values Video. While the teams had been “living” our values in the hours before — via appropriately designed activities — they had yet not known what those actually were. As the video played on, everyone erupted with excitement — marveling at the script and hidden acting talent of their colleagues. This had been a day unlike any other: full of fun, team bonding, and purpose. From this point on, it was all about bringing these values to life every day.
¹ For an up-close look at the icons as well as what each value means, visit http://www.venturedive.com/culture.
² More pictures from the event are here.
