Evolving our values & being intentional about culture change

Earlier this year, I shared an article about the evolution of our company values and the integral role they've played helping us shape our culture at C Space as we've transformed. Having lived with them for several years and seen the huge impact they'd had on our culture, we were starting to feel that we needed to refresh and re-energize people around what they really meant and why they matter.

We heard in this summer's Americas engagement survey that 85% of our people agree we have values they can relate to and 84% believe their colleagues act in line with our values.

A solid foundation...

...but we were also beginning to experience misunderstandings, and see less desirable behaviors emerging, linked to values lived too strongly or interpreted too literally.

“We fully live 'I Got This'. I work with some of the hardest working, most reliable people I've ever met", but also: “I feel the pressure to say 'I Got This' even though I have no idea how to do this. Once I say 'I Got This', I don’t know how to ask for help. I then find myself struggling to get the work done, feeling alone and worried it won’t turn out well.” 

We started thinking about how to refresh our values more than a year ago. It's been quite a journey! Just as we were kicking off our efforts, our story piqued the interest of a journalist at Quartz at Work who was curious about why we'd want to share an honest tale of the challenges we'd experienced in developing and embedding our values, rather than give a more sanitized, sugar-coated account. I talk a lot about the importance of transparency, so this felt like a great opportunity to open up about the positive AND negative elements of having a strong culture.

She interviewed me and various C Spacers who'd been involved in developing our values, as well as more recent hires who could comment on whether we really walked the talk, and people involved in efforts to evolve our values as our business changes. We'd have no final sign-off on how she chose to spin the story. Of course, she focused on the juicy bits and omitted so much of the good stuff that has come out of our efforts to be a more values-driven organization, but that's OK. We know we're a work in progress.

With some trepidation, I shared the article with everyone at C Space the next day, noting how exposing it can feel to open up about something you’ve worked on so passionately, knowing that people (internal and external to C Space) will read it, judge your words and actions, your intentions as a leader and the results of what you’ve done, the bits that have worked and the bits that haven’t.

In that note I sent out to the company a year ago, I included the following paragraph, which I feel just as passionate about today:

"Overwhelmingly, I'm proud of where we've gotten to. I'm proud of the decision we made three years ago to really take control of our culture. That we are continuing to challenge ourselves and work hard to keep things relevant. I’m proud of the people who poured their hearts into shaping our Values on both sides of the Atlantic, and the teams and people that continue to push and challenge, and say when things aren’t working. I’m glad that people care enough to point out when they feel we’ve lost our way, and that they share ideas on how we can adapt. I’m proud that we’re having difficult conversations as a leadership team, and as a business, about whether we’re really living the values and whether we’re celebrating them in the right way. And that we’re not afraid to share this story with the outside world (warts and all), show that we’re not perfect, but we’re working at getting better every day. I think that’s what really matters. As the journalist points out, ‘culture is fragile’. I believe it’s something we create and something that we have to stay committed to and keep working at. We need to be transparent about what is and isn’t working. I hope this article triggers more of those conversations."

It certainly did. Many of our team appreciated the move to publicly share our story and were excited about us committing to evolving our values and having uncomfortable conversations. But I also got messages through anonymous feedback channels like TinyPulse questioning whether it was a good thing for C Space to have a Chief People Officer who they perceived as not buying in to our values. This couldn't have been further from the truth, but I can understand how the confusion arose given the way the story had been told.

Still, the article provided fuel for some great conversations and helped us build energy around the need to continue to transform and openly discuss what was and wasn't working. A few days after it published, I got a note from the Institute of Communication Agencies in Canada asking whether I'd be happy to share our story at their Agency Transformation Summit in Toronto. Another 'do what scares me' moment and an opportunity to learn from other organizations about how they're dealing with similar challenges. It's been fun reflecting on our experience on podcasts about culture, engagement and leadership, and we're proud to be featured in a couple of forthcoming books about building company culture (out later this year and early 2020). But there have also been lows and moments of self-doubt too where I've questioned my effectiveness as a leader - a lengthy and passionate anonymous comment in our employee engagement survey that suggested I spend less time on LinkedIn and more time focused on fixing our company culture knocked me for six. But in the end my conviction and pride that we have great lessons to share (and a lot of encouragement from the team around me) helped me get back on track.

So, after a year of reflection, it was exciting earlier this month to relaunch the values into our Americas offices in Boston, New York and San Francisco.

Various employee surveys, workshops and insights from exit interviews and water-cooler conversations fed into the refresh. We knew at the start we didn't want to change our values, but we've freshened up the language under each of them, helping people to understand 'when it works' and 'when it doesn't'. You can see the old and refreshed versions of 'show the love' below. We hope this helps people make a shift from seeing 'show the love' as only being about praise and recognition, and now also understand it as linked to caring enough about someone to provide feedback on how they're doing, and taking care of yourself as well as others.

It was fantastic working with Josh, Eric, Eduardo & Bethany on our incredible Creative Team, who helped us to refresh the brand identity for our values and campaign them through the business in the run-up to the all staff meeting where we shared them back with the everyone.

Jessie led efforts to create a workbook which we distributed at our staff meeting (and sent out to all of our remote team with instructions not to open until the session to create a bit of intrigue). The intent was to evolve the values from a static display on the wall to something that people engage with and think about. Throughout the booklet there are prompts people can use for self reflection, with people they work with, or in team workshops:

• What am I saying about someone that I should be saying to them? (tell it like it is)
• What are three things that give me energy? (show the love)
• What's one new idea I could take to my client this week? (find what fascinates)

We spent some time during our company meeting reflecting on what surprised or challenged our thinking with the refreshed framing of our values... and then ended by encouraging people to use the values both as a tool for self-reflection to help us consider the way our own behavior impacts others, but also as a way to recognize colleagues and 'catch people doing things right'.

We ended the all staff session early, with everyone filling out a Values Nomination card and delivering it to the desk (or digitally) to someone they wanted to recognize. 350 nominations to start what we hope will become a new habit for people.

So that's the end of one more chapter in the story of the evolution of our values... but of course, it's really just the next beginning. Our challenge now will be to ensure we continue to embed, celebrate and reinforce them to help our people and business grow. We're focused on making our clients' business more human, and we need to ensure we're also building a more human organization ourselves... and remaining intentional about the culture and experience we want to create for our people and clients.

We've got lots of ideas, but would love to also hear from others about what has and hasn't worked for your organizations.

A HUGE thank you to everyone involved. It's been a mammoth co-creative effort!