Values Are Not Just a Powerpoint Presentation

It can be a fun process establishing an organisation’s values – but creating your company values is just the beginning…

Often there is extensive engagement in creating and establishing values, for example taking the best of both in a merger or running employee focus groups to assess views and establish key themes.

What follows, post launch, should be a campaign and the integration of the values into core activities. The campaign should be physical and virtual – yes onto website, workplace walls etc but also into processes such as performance management; it’s very simple to add in “how are you living our company values?”

The time taken to embed values should not be understated; this takes time, 2–3 years is not unreasonable. Often a difficult conversation to have with budget holders.

I’ve worked at an organisation where the values were on the intranet in a PDF of a PowerPoint presentation – this was deemed at launched. The only other reference was in a highly controlled induction presentation. This isn’t engagement and embedding – it’s purely communication and certainly didn’t help full employee understanding. 

So let’s all recognise that creating and embedding values for a company takes time and effort – they are certainly not just ‘published.’