What can we do to bring our values to life?

A while ago we articulated the values of our business but I wouldn’t really say that everyone is living them. What should we do to bring them to life?

After the energy and excitement of articulating a company’s values all too often they are simply printed out, popped on the wall and largely ignored. As they collect dust the skeptics ask why the company had bothered working up the values in the first place; it’s good point.

So if you are going to go to the hard work of articulating your values you’d be foolish not to do the relatively easy part of bringing them to life in your business.

How do you do that? By focusing on these three areas:

1. Check that you’re making it easy to live the values

Sometimes a business unwittingly puts barriers in the way of people living the values. A common example is where something akin to “WOW customer service” is a value but employees aren’t empowered to go beyond the standard processes and action the thing that would make the difference.

Contrast this with what happens at Ritz Carlton. One of the Ritz Carlton service values is “I own and immediately resolve guest problems” and to enable employees to live this, all front-line service employees are allowed to spend up to $2,000 per guest per day to “fix” any problems, as well as receiving ongoing problem-resolution training where they learn things like how to “personalise the resolution to truly delight the individual,” and to “let the individual vent.”

2. Talk about the values until you are blue in the face

To be honest, unless you are constantly talking about and referring to your values, employees have a tendency to believe that ‘values’ was just a funny phase you were going through! So if you want your team to forever live the values you need to be always talking about them. A great way to do this is to get employees to regularly (and by that I mean daily or weekly) share stories about how they have lived one of the values.

Every day at Ritz Carlton all employees – including housekeeping, porters and cleaners – join a ‘line up’ at which they share customer service stories.

Another fun thing to do is for the whole business to focus deeply on one value each month; this serves as a refresher for long-term employees and as education for the newbies.

3. Be tough on people who don’t live the values

The first two points above are quite fun but if you really want to embed the values in your culture then occasionally you also have to do something unpleasant. Essentially if you have an employee who is not living the values of your business you have to get tough – either they shape up or you ship them out, even if they are very good at their job. Yep, it hurts and yes it’s insanely hard to, but over time you get better at hiring people whose values fit your business so it becomes less of an issue.

And that neatly takes us back to where we started a couple of weeks ago when I started this little series on values. I was prompted to write it because of a business I met that was making a number of hiring mistakes. The employees the business hired had the technical know-how but somehow ‘didn’t fit’. Now that the business has articulated and embedded their values they have found that taking on new employees is a way more enjoyable process.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).