Why company values matter

Written by

Ben Everard

Company values are the guiding principles by which you run your organisation. If lived properly, they determine how you treat your clients and employees, the type of work you do and who you work with, and how you present your company to the world. Choose them wisely, for they’ll also be the yardstick the world judges you by.

TLDR: Company values are the backbone by which you set your moral and ethical compass as a business – here’s why we think they’re important and some tips on setting your own.

Why are having company values important?

Having values that define your company and its’ ethos are integral to setting the tone for your business. They are the compass by which you set your direction. Even if you don’t have them written down, you’re still guided by the internal principles that you live by. This could be an ethical standpoint, such as wanting to remain eco-friendly in your practises; they could also be less morally driven, such as wanting to gain wealth and success.

Our company values are important to us because they guide our choices when making decisions. They assist in demonstrating who we are as a company for both clients and new starters alike; they also detail our moral and ethical standpoint, which shows people who they’d be working with, as well as defining who we choose not to work with. This is something we’re quite upfront about – we specify these elements in our client proposals so they can see how our values align with their own.

One of our clients, Alitex, created their whole ethos around demonstrating their core beliefs through their work. They pride themselves on doing so so much that they collaborated with us to build systems that support their employees in demonstrating their learning and work towards upholding the company’s values.

How our company values drive our thinking

To put together our core values, we worked with an external copywriter to assist us in crafting our brand story. This collaborative process enabled us to bring them to life. Our values now make up a large part of our proposals and credentials document, helping us demonstrate how incredibly important they are to us, and that they align with the type of work we do and the clients we work with, e.g. charities, non-profits and NGO’s.

Loyalty

We don’t want our relationships with our clients to feel transactional – it’s a partnership, not a one-way street, and we see ourselves as an extension of their teams, working together to achieve their goals. We want to build upon these relationships and grow with them, so we can produce the best work for our clients’ needs. Our job is to enable them to succeed at what they do best.

Honesty

One of our core beliefs is to be candid about all our practises, making everything clear and easy to understand. We believe in building trust with our clients to create meaningful relationships with them. You need to know you’re in good hands when you take on an external partner and that you’re placing your expectations in a team you can rely on. That’s why you’ll never get any fluff or blunder from us – we want to make sure we’re as transparent as possible from the get go, so you know where you stand.

Impact & Sustainability

The impact we have on both people and the world means a great deal to us. We absorb and project the enthusiasm our clients have for their causes, allowing it to have an influence on our values as a company. This means that sometimes, we have to decline working with organisations from particular industries or sectors: two that we have a ‘no project’ policy with are the gambling sector, that preys on vulnerable people, and the fossil fuel industry, because of its destructive effects on the world at large.

“The Idea Bureau really helped us to focus on the user experience, getting the very most out of the budget we had. You could sense that the cause was just as important to them as it was to us. They wanted to get it right; they did that and more. Thank you for being so committed to helping us achieve our aims.”

Collaboration

We view all our work with our clients as a collaborative process. We don’t want to just produce a website in isolation; we want to create it alongside you, as an extension of your team, supporting you through the entirety of the project. Ultimately, this is your website or app, so we’re open to suggestions and welcome feedback throughout the process. We also begin all our work with a discovery session to give you the opportunity to really lay out what you need and bring us on board with your vision.

Writing your own company values

If you’re already an established organisation, but haven’t put your company values together yet, now’s the time to decide if you wish to write them with your team’s input or to sit down as a founder(s) to set them yourself. If you choose to do the former, you’ll need to think of some ways to engage your team with the values and help them to take them on board – this is really important, as they’ll be the ones putting them into practise in the day-to-day. However, you need to make sure you’re demonstrating them yourselves in the way you approach things: as the organisation’s leader(s), these important fundamental beliefs need to come from the top down.

To assist with this, here are a few steps you can take to help your team(s) instill them into their workflow:

Make them memorable

There’s no point in creating a bunch of values that you want your employees to live by if they can’t remember them.

Get your team members to input into values in the first place – this will help solidify them and give them buy in.
Hold some workshops to go through them – this is an especially good idea if you’ve not ‘crowdsourced’ the ideas for the values when setting them.
Have them written up in your office(s), if you have a ‘bricks and mortar’ building; if you haven’t, ask your employees to keep a copy of them somewhere they can see them and ask that they review them regularly.
Talk about them: in your meetings, use them to set goals for team reviews, in your social media – you need to ensure everyone’s on board with them and living them through their work (leadership especially!).

Keep them short

Similarly to above, you want to make it as easy as possible for teams to take in the values and start demonstrating them daily.

Try starting out with just a few values that you want everyone in the organisation to live by – 3 to 5 should do to begin with; you can always build upon this starting point in the future.
Start by writing the values out as a longer, unrefined sentence, then take some time to distill them down into a more bitesize structure. Use some engaging words to get your point across succinctly. You could have someone design a poster with an eye catching design to display them, too.
If you’re having trouble coming up with the values yourself, you can always ask for help:
- This is where getting your team involved is a great idea because they will see the ways in which your organisation delivers its work and can provide a good insight into those actions (e.g. is leadership hands on? Do you encourage kindness and collaboration in your teams?).
- You could always bring on an external provider to help you describe your values – make sure you’re very integrated in this process, if you go down that route, or they won’t feel genuine and be difficult to embed down the line.

And thirdly:

Choose values that resonate

If they don’t fit with your business and the actions you take to fulfil your stakeholders needs, then you won’t engage with them going forward.

What does it mean to you to have a set of core beliefs and principles? Here are some examples of other charities’ and non-profits’ values and mission statements, and what they mean to them:

Conclusion

If you select a set of values that stick, that you feel in your core being, then you’ll be more likely to deliver on the promise of them – because, that’s what they are: a promise to those you employ and those you deliver your service to to uphold your beliefs and principles that hopefully align with theirs, too.

Set some reviews throughout the year to keep track of how your work and actions demonstrate your integrity in living out your values. This can highlight any sticking points and action points for continuing to do so. It might also show any changes needed to make them more relevant to you and your team.