4 Simple Steps to Uncover Your Organisation’s Values

Too many organisations have a list of values that are meaningless to most employees because they are superfluous to how real decisions get made, or how real work gets done. Additionally the values are just not brought to life and therefore its not clear how they impact ways of working.

This is such a wasted opportunity for engagement and creation of meaning at work, and I would suggest bringing personal and organisational values to life is a core part of purpose driven work.

So here’s a simple 4-step process to get values to work.

1.    Help people find their values. Using a simple tool such as the Values In Action Survey (develop by the work of Martin Seligman at Penn State University) https://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey is a great start. Or even better invite every manage in your organisation to have a team, or 1:1 conversation with each of their team members, on what each of their personal values are. Seligman’s work showed that using your top values in new ways each day has a statistically significant impact on well-being, so even doing this first step has benefits.

2.    Gather in the top 5 values from everyone in the organisation. Analyse the data and pull out the 10-20 most common values.

3.    Ask people to share stories to bring to life these top 10-20 values.

4.    When you have a good gallery of stories on the top values then get everyone to vote on what the top 3-5 are.

Now you have your organizational values, with everyone having had input into the process, and great stories around them to bring them to life. 

Next step is to bring them forward and center, in front of rules and procedures. Let the values determine how things get done, how decisions get made and how people interact. 

 You can then turn long, complex, over-restrictive policies and rules into something values driven and simple, as seen with Netflix’s travel policy: “act in Netflix’s best interest”