Creating Our Company Principles

At the start of each year, one of the first things we do as a company is to create and revisit our company principles. 

So what's the difference between our vision, values and our principles? Essentially, our principles are guidelines on how we run the business. While our vision and values are broad and conceptual, the principles are the practical ways in which we fulfil on them.

You may be wondering why this is so important to me - after all, what's so wrong with what we had last year? Surely there's no need to change principles every twelve months!

And to that, I'd say one thing. . . 2020! A lot can and will happen in a year! Not only has our business undergone massive changes in response to the global pandemic, but we have doubled our team! With that comes new challenges, insights, and ways of being.

That's why it's essential, as a team, to revisit our guidelines, and make sure we are all aligned. So let's take a look at how our team created our principles for 2020!

Discussion and Reflection

Firstly, we initiated the discussion on creating our principles. Team members were given time to brainstorm individually and in groups on what came to mind as important. 

We Distilled the Feedback

Based on the team's feedback, I boiled down the concepts into principles, and brought them to the team. We then worked through each principle, making changes where necessary, adding, subtracting - whatever was needed to capture its essence.

We Documented the Result

We have now saved those principles in an easily accessible document for all team members to refer to. 

So what are our principles, you may ask? Well, I will be exploring them with you on LinkedIn over the coming days!

Do you have specific guiding principles in your company? I’d love to hear what they are.