Business values are extremely important, your personal life and personal circumstances also reflect your values, and this works on a subconscious level. I am a massive believer in working from your values, both personally and as a business. It did, however, take me time to understand what values meant and how to live them out.
I recently did an exercise with the team to clarify our values' expectations, what behaviors highlight our values, and which behaviors really don't. This was a great exercise that we did with our management team, it's a great refresh of the values, giving them more backbone and understanding. I believe that if your management team is living out the business values, that directly impacts all the other teams and offers an awesome customer experience and a great working environment.
Once you have established your business values, then ask a couple of key questions to identify these as desired behaviors
1 - What behaviors (everyday actions) would a model our team member live for this value to come to life?
2 - What behaviors are so important that you'd potentially fire someone who did not consistently live and demonstrate them?
3 - What behaviors are not acceptable based on this core value?
We brainstormed on 1 and 2 above together ie. the two different angles sort of answer the same thing… And then brainstorm 3 separately.
The objective of identifying the behaviors/actions was to create examples of what each value means and how it is applied in business (internal and external) dealings day in and day out. This provides clarity and leaves no room to question what each value means.
Our values are
- Honesty/integrity
- Empathy
- Achievement/success
- Communication
- Service
Now I know for me that I look at the above words and think - ok great, here are our values, they are just a list of words, and if I think that, I am sure the team are all thinking the same thing, so transferring these into behaviors puts these "words" into behaviors to live out daily.
Simply put into behaviors
5 Core behaviors (values)
- Be Honest
- Caring and understanding
- Hard-working
- Be open with each other
- Look after each other and our customers
This is simple, but the impacts are enormous on the team, giving them a guide to work by, setting expectations, and offering a great team environment and a great customer experience.
What are your values? Have you ever done something like this with your team? Its simple to do with massive amounts of impact.
This is just one of the many things we can work on with you and your business—touch base of a free 30min chat.
