Designing & Communicating Company Values
Company strategy and goals are what you set out to do, and company values are the how. Between my early career days in HR, various communications roles, and consulting, I’ve been part of teams designing and launching company values quite a few times.
I’ve learned that the most meaningful and worthy company values follow these three principles:
exhibit personality unique to the organization
are practiced and demonstrated by the leadership team
are talked about everywhere all the time
I recently had the opportunity to combine my values experience at Mitel following the acquisition of a large company. As a new organization twice the size it was before, we set out to evolve Mitel’s former values to reflect the new team and support building an integrated culture.
I co-led the discovery, design, and implementation of the values with an HR colleague. We launched a new set of values that reflected the heritage of both teams and the reality of employees’ experience today while creating plenty of room for aspirational growth in the future.
At the time of writing this, we’ve launched the values internally and are working with teams to embed the values into programs and processes across the company and with leaders to ensure they model and talk about the values all the time. We are also launching them externally.
Employees and leaders have shared that they like how each value is a short statement rather than a word, that the values reflect their experience, and that they like how the values are open enough that they can meaningfully apply them to their own functions. The more modern look and feel contributed to the launch’s success too. (Shout out again to the best graphic designer Nicole Heeti).
You can preview two items in the collection above: visual assets and highlights from this most recent project, and a manager guide I created to support the former set of values back in 2020.
