How IK Established Company Values Statements

“Developing your corporate values early in your company’s history can have a lasting and positive effect on your organization and its culture, and it’s easier to do when your team is small. After all, it’s much easier to steer a four-person speedboat than a 2,000-person cruise ship. Once your team grows larger, it may be challenging to reach consensus around what your values should be.”
- How To Establish Values On A Small Team by Amelia Friedman

Let me say that the process for creating value statements has been a several-month process. Here’s a look at how we established and came up with our company values:

We Do It Together

In June, we had a staff retreat to begin establishing our values statements and goals as a company. Before the event, everyone was asked to do some homework. Each employee was asked to read How To Establish Values On A Small Team by Amelia Friedman and then fill out an anonymous survey.

When it came time for the retreat, we went through and discussed all the collected answers to the survey questions as a group. Each answer was put onto a sticky-note Kanban-style and we sorted them into themes.

It was a priority of the leadership team that the process of creating this statement was truly a collaborative one. Every person in the company contributed to our values statements and their creation. These statements are what will help define expectations of each employee and by allowing everyone to contribute, it creates a sense of ownership as well as some accountability.

We Work With Purpose

By defining the things that we value in ourselves, employers and coworkers, each person took ownership.  Eventually, our Kanban board made it into a Google document. Again, similar themes were highlighted to show the crossover.

Our Project Manager, Erika, then organized the top themes into 4 different areas:

1. What we strive for

2. What we want to be

3. What we value in others

4. How we want to feel

She took several of the words that were repeated and moved them into a list under each of these 4 themes. About a month later, each person chose which word was the most important to them from each column. A tick was placed next to each word that was chosen.

We Solve the Right Problems

After the above exercise, each person was asked to draft his or her own version of a group of value statements based on the chart and use the words that were marked the most important to us. This gave everyone time to ingest all that we discussed.

We Embrace Change

When we came together next, we had a chance to review everyone’s drafts. This is where things got a little trickier. Ultimately we broke off into a smaller group for efficiency.

A segment of 5 employees met and reviewed the drafts that each employee had created and felt totally overwhelmed at what to do next. The group made notes of which parts of the created drafts we thought were similar, which wording stood out the most.

We Finish Strong

To further narrow down the statements, two of us took a pass at a draft to combine the chart and the new individual drafts. We then asked a freelance writer to help us consolidate the 2 new statements.

After several more revisions, some group feedback, more revisions (and a few tears) we finally felt like we had distilled down the essence of our combined team values.

Here’s what we came up with:

We Glow then Grow

Now we’re in the last phase where it is time to put our values into practice. Of course, no values statements are written in stone. I am sure at some point these will be modified and updated as the company grows. But for now, we are proud of what we came up with.

Ultimately, investing time to let all employees create and contribute to our value statements not only makes for a more pleasant workplace, but for stronger work relationships.

By fostering everyone’s voice, we can work better together and continue to build a company that is successful AND a great place to work.