No Value in Values

By James Adonis

Every couple of years a new HR buzzword comes into play. Total quality management was in vogue for a while, then change management had a go, and now it seems that employee engagement is the latest HR obsession. What seems to have stood the test of time is 'company values' and why this is the case is totally beyond me.

Scroll through the management textbooks, how-to guides, and the plethora of websites on values, and you'll find a stack of reasons why every company should have a list of values, usually five of them (or so we're told). I'd like to go through the most common of these reasons to highlight how vacuous they really are.

Values send a clear message to employees about the work environment: It's not the values that paint a clear picture of the work environment. It's the behaviour of the employees that paints the picture. I've worked with companies who have had values such as 'meritocracy' and yet promotional decisions were rarely ever based on merit but more so on who your mates were. Actions speak louder than values. One of Enron's company values was 'Integrity'. Enough said.

Company values are important to customers: No, they're not. What customers care about is price, speed, quality or ease - the four fundamentals of a customer experience. If customers cared so much about a company's internal values, we'd have company values plastered all over the thousands of advertisements we're bombarded with each day. But we don't.

Values tell employees how they should behave: Employees are more influenced by how their peers behave rather than a set of company-imposed values. If the behaviours within an organisation is already negative, poisonous and stale, writing up a handful of values isn't going to make a difference. One of One.Tel's values was 'Make it Better'. Riiiight. It didn't work for them, that's for sure.

Values help us to recruit the right people: Managers hire people that are just like them. The majority of managers decide within the first minute of meeting someone whether they like them or not. They then spend the rest of the interview asking questions which prove their initial theory. Sure, there are exceptions, but by and large my assumption is correct. Values are hardly ever a thought during the recruitment process, especially in the tight labour market we're currently experiencing. And let's suppose values did play a crucial role when making hiring decisions, upon joining the company these values angels will either adapt to the slack culture that's already in place or they'll resign due to the cultural incongruence.

In most companies, values are thrown up on walls like bad graffiti, often printed on fancy paper using ugly fonts straight from Microsoft Word, with the edges of the posters curling up and looking dishevelled. And yet companies expect this to work. The more progressive companies take it one step further by running values workshops, again assuming that employees will happily change their way of life, their way of thinking, their way of being, just for the sake of a few words. I don't think so.

So then if values are pretty much redundant, what should we do? Here are a few ideas:

Be a role model: Really, I hate hearing that term as much as you do. Role model. It's so cliche - but it's true. So many managers and executives profess that 'our people are our greatest asset' and then sack them the moment times get tough. Role model the behaviour you most want to see. You want respect? Show it first.

Don't just use values for wallpaper: If you must have values, really live them. Base all rewards and recognition programs on them. Hire and fire using your values as the benchmark. Print them on all of your internal stationery. Raise them as items of discussion at your meetings. Often the people that get promoted are those who can run masters degrees on office politics rather than the ones who abide by a company's values. Provide training so that your people know what the values mean, the specific behaviours to match each value, and what they should do if they see a colleague or a manager breaking them.

Predict future behaviour: No matter which fancy values you come up with, you can't instil them in people. Your employees have their own values and that's that. For example, introducing a new value of 'risk-taking' won't work if you've got a workforce that's averse to risk. If anything, it'll make them leave. Instead, use your values to predict future behaviour. If you know that in order to achieve your business strategy you'll need a high level of risk, then analyse your team to see how many of them have risk as a value. The solution would then be to make the risk-takers your project leaders. Either way, just know that you can't shove a value in someone if it doesn't already exist within them.

Company values have lost their value. For a while they were a box that could be ticked on a HR Manager's performance appraisal, but now they're not even worthy of that. They should be scrapped along with performance appraisals - but that's another story...

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