Pick our brains - Knowledgebase
Question 19 of 32 View all 32 questions
- Q.How important are your Company Values, and how do you communicate them and relate them to your employees’ behaviours?
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- Jamie Greenwood
- NJL Yorkline
A.Paramount - integrate them into every day business.
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- Michael Bates
- Walton Bates Associates
A.Vital. Live them. Admit when you fail. Learn from your mistakes.
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- Ian Baggett
- Adderstone Group
A.Very important for everyone to buy into and share common values and aims – whether they are formalized or not. We have them on the toilet doors as part of going for IIP!
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A.I work so closely with my small team, they get the vibes.
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A.Important - live them every day.
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A.It is essential in any organisation that the members of the team understand your values. In a small company that is quite easy, more complex but even more important in a larger organisation with multiple sites. They must understand how you want them to behave and to know your Vision and your Strategy. Every member of the team must realise that they are representing their leader at all times, at work and in their leisure time. Jack Welch of GE said the people who live by the values and deliver the numbers are your key people. The people who don’t live by the values and don’t deliver the numbers make decision making very easy. They are out! The problem for leaders is what you do with the person who delivers the numbers but does not live by the values. That is the tough decision but the one that the great leader makes when he or she is building Values Driven Company. The leader and the senior team must live the Values day in and day out!
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A.Company values are very, very important but what they tend to be is embodied in the attitude and the general demeanour of the Chief Executive in the company. You can have a list of values on your website but unless the Chief Executive believes in them they’ll never actually get any further than the website. The Chief Executive and his team then need to walk the walk, and talk the talk. Live the values. If you treat people as you want people to treat you and you talk about those values and you deliver those values yourself and then, hopefully, your people will take them on board. And if you have employed the right people with the right attitude and if you’ve taught them the necessary skills, they will embody those values and they will deliver those values for you.
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A.Very, very important but I’m a great believer in avoiding the meaningless mission statements. I think so many people have mission statements but I don’t think often they reflect the company values. They can be professionalism, they can be service, they can be honesty and integrity because, at the end of the day, customers buy in to you as individuals and the values of your business.
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- David Stonehouse
- TSG
A.Important – but still work in progress as regards getting overall culture right. Gets communicated through induction, in house newsletter, appraisals, etc.
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- Tony Whelan
- Whelan Construction
A.My top team and I live the Company Values - this then passes off on to staff.
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A.They’re very important. If someone is not performing correctly I usually talk to them and explain why they should, what they should do I should say.
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A.Very Important (As #1)
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A.Well I’m not very fond of these sort of wacky value statements put up on the wall. I think that normally, real human beings see those and laugh with contempt because it sort of comes out of a book and it’s management speak rather than entrepreneur speak. I think what’s real about values is when people just know who you are, what you stand for and what you want to achieve as the entrepreneur and agree with it. Then you’ve got something stronger than any value statement pinned neatly on the wall or whatever.
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- David Gillam
- Spinnaka Ltd
A.We have a website and when we put that together we were asked by the people who were designing it with us what message we wanted to get across. We’ve said to people that we want to be the best as judged by our clients, not the biggest, but we also want to be the most fun to work with and for. I don’t think you can ever expect a junior in the office earning £10 - £12,000 a year to love coming to work in the way that you do if you’re the business owner but for me, life is too short for them to be spending too many years doing something they hate so I’d love them to at least quite enjoy their time in the office, so that’s what we try and do.
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- Paul Callaghan
- Leighton Ltd
A.I want people to think that we are an ethical and honest business and the reason why I want them to think that is not because we’re not, it’s because I firmly believe that we must treat people both internally within the business and externally fairly. And I want my employees to do exactly the same thing and they know that and they know that if they ever suggest doing things which are going to disadvantage clients, be fraudulent, they would just not be here, they’d be out of the door before the end of the day. So people understand what our values are and how our values have come about and they buy into that and we don’t cut corners legally, we would never do things we thought were unethical and I think people tend to know that and they judge you by that. Once they get to know you they know what sort of person you are and they decide they want to work with you. It may mean that we don’t make as much money as we could - I don’t care, I want to be judged in the long term as being decent people. There are people out there who are not and their reputation goes before them.
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- Martin McTague
- Pical CIC
A.I think they’re very important and I think you should communicate them by example.
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- Fiona Raglan
- Dipsticks Research
A.Company values are hugely important. It has to come from the top but whether I’m physically in the office or out and about working, my whole team in the company knows its values. I would never ask anybody to do anything that I wasn’t prepared to do myself and that involves working many evenings, moderating focus groups, emptying the dishwasher or the bins on occasions. Everybody just helps out and that’s the company values. They haven’t changed from the time when there were only two of us, to now when there’s thirty of us.
