Bringing vision and values alive for employees

Bringing your company vision, values and direction alive creatively for employees is key to their involvement and engagement.

Creating a set of clear and coherent values for your organisation is so much more than just a ‘nice to have’. Robust and meaningful business values, and the process used to create them, can have a real impact on the success and long-term health of an organisation. Synergy’s double page feature in the latest issue of HR Director magazine explains the importance of making values and integral part of your organisation and the guiding principles for everything said and done. Extract: Creating company values is, usually, the easy part. The struggle begins in bringing these values alive in a way that engages and enthuses employees. Gemma McGrattan, Synergy Creative, a brand engagement and internal communications agency, believes that a two pronged approach – with strong leadership coupled with involvement from employees is the route to success. Creating a set of clear and coherent values for your organisation is so much more than just a ‘nice to have’. Robust and meaningful business values, and the process used to create them, can have a real impact on the success and long term health of an organisation. But of course in order to achieve this they have to be more than just words on a page. They need to become an integral part of the organisation and the guiding principles for everything that is said and done. Easy to say, but how easy is it to achieve? To become truly embedded in an organisation’s culture the values need to be more than just a page on the website or something rolled out at induction sessions never to be referred to again. They should support and uphold the wider strategic direction of the business, demonstrate how employees should behave and shape the activities required to achieve business objectives. In practice this means that values should translate easily into tangible actions and behaviours that are relevant to everyone in the organisation. Once established and understood they can be a useful tool in communicating what is expected of employees, becoming a checklist for decision making and playing a key role in achieving an organisation’s ambitions. In order to achieve this level of immersion into an organisations activities it’s vital that there is buy in and acceptance from those leading the organisation. All managers, from board level to those heading up individual departments, must be able to not only articulate the vision and values but also understand the link from them to the strategy and behaviours that will achieve the organisation’s goals. It is this understanding that will enable them to communicate the values to employees in a way that engages, interests and excites them. Read the full ‘Building Business Values’ report by clicking here.