Launching your values? Try living them first.

People often ask me which type of companies I want to work with. My answer is: those who get it. 

What do I mean by that? Let me share a personal example. 

When I lived in Sydney, I headed up internal comms at Microsoft Australia on a maternity cover contract.

I’d come from financial services and the difference in culture blew my mind. I had to adapt from what I was used to, but I loved it. I swore it had ruined me working for anyone else ever again. 

So, what did this culture look like in practice?

  • People only joined after a thorough interview process. They had a motto: ‘An ok hire is a no hire.’ Once you were in, there was no probation period. You were helped to succeed. 

  • My colleagues were awesome at their jobs. They turned up to meetings on time, took their actions and delivered. You never needed to chase. 

  • The management genuinely cared about every single member of their team. I once sat in a leadership meeting where a restructure was being planned. I saw them go over it again and again until they’d found everyone a role.

  • The MD cried at an all-hands the first time Microsoft went through job cuts — and then personally called every single people manager who’d had to let someone go to check they were ok. 

  • In my first week, I asked if I could come in late one day a week to attend pilates for my scoliosis. My manager told me I never had to ask her about stuff like that because she trusted me to get the job done.

  • Annual employee events that got feedback like: “It’s been a really tough year, competing against Apple and Google, but today I was reminded why I’ll never leave Microsoft”.

What was their secret? 

The leadership team had been through an extensive development programme, based on the book Conscious Business: How to build value through values. As a result of that work, they’d created a way of working that they all signed up to and held one other accountable for. 

By the time I joined, they had begun to share this way of working with people managers and a group of “culture champs”. 

Being new and keen, I offered to get started on a comms strategy to roll these values out more widely — to all employees. But the HR Director told me not to. 

She said: “We won’t start talking to employees until our people managers are living the values day to day. So that when we do, they’ll know we’re serious — because they’ll have already seen the values in action from their managers.”

Think about that for a moment…

Think about the time it takes to do the work as a leadership team to not only define your values, but to incorporate them into your day-to-day work. 

Think, too, about the time taken to do the same with the next level down in the organisation — your people managers. 

And only when they’re all living and breathing the values do you start talking to employees about them.  

Compare that process with what happens all too often:

  1. Leadership creates a set of values that don’t ring true (and very often are just table stakes values).

  2. The values are “launched”.

  3. Nothing changes. Everyone knows it’s just a tick-box exercise. And if people were already feeling demotivated, maybe they now feel even worse than they did before. 

At Broom & Moon, like my ex-colleagues at Microsoft Australia, we believe in the value of values. We can help you: 

  • Consult with your people to uncover what your values should be.

  • Articulate your values, using language that resonates with your employees, future employees and customers. 

  • Embed those values so that they make a real difference to your people — and your profits. 

Sounds good? Drop us a line.


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