The heart of your culture. The start of a scalable-company ethos. Anchors to hold onto when executing work or hiring new employees.
Whatever core values mean to you, they are unique to your company. Living your company’s core values should be natural, but can often be made easier. Simple tools can go a long way to helping your company become closer to its ideal state.
Of course, deploying Slack across your company doesn’t mean you’re immediately a people-centric company. It’s never that simple. At the same time, technology can help more than most companies think. Robert Ferguson, a well-known consultant on core values, analyzed the Fortune top 500 and came to the conclusion that all core values can be generalized into a set of common values. Chances are high that your company has some of these, so we’ve added examples of tools that can help you execute these core values across your company.
Integrity, Respect and Achievement
Synonyms: Ethics and Honesty, Trust and Dignity, Results and Success
Recommended tool: Google Sheets
What the sheet?! Yes, you read it right. Google Sheets is an excellent tool to promote integrity in your company. To have integrity is to be transparent – to be respectful is to trust. Even in uncomfortable situations, you need to be honest about who you are and where you stand. Because Google Sheets is cloud-based, everyone can access everything in your organization if you choose to share it – including your company’s most important metrics such as revenue. Springest, another scalable tech company, is a good example of this: they have weekly updates where they walk through all metrics relevant to their solution: visitor number, conversion rate, cash flow, and even employee happiness. Outside of the meeting, everyone can access this sheet at all times. Why? Because even if it’s uncomfortable, this sheet helps employees paint a complete picture, helping them to make more informed decisions.
Excellence
Synonyms: Quality, Performance
Recommended tool: Impraise
“Your employees hate the annual performance review”. A statement echoed by the working force around the world – and by Impraise. It’s a 360-degree feedback tool that allows your employees to proactively ask for input on their performance, whenever they want. It helps create a continuous stream of project-based feedback that grants a more timely and objective view of employee performance. Being a SaaS tool, it’s also easy to deploy.
Responsibility and Teamwork
Synonyms: Accountability and Commitment, Collaboration and Cooperation
Recommended tool: Asana
When it comes to project management tools, few come close to Asana. Why? Because it’s so easy to use! Task-and-project related conversation also happens naturally, made possible through a really friendly User Interface (UI). It also integrates with a huge variety of tools, mainly thanks to Zapier. This is the place employees will use to give immediate feedback on tasks and projects, which means it’s the place to be if you want to see the level of soft skills in your company. Because it’s not defined as a communications tool as much as the previous three, it easily gets overlooked. Don’t let that happen to you, because if you’re in a fast growing company, you’re definitely using some sort of project management tool. Just let it be this one.
It’s obvious why this promotes teamwork, but the “Responsibility” value comes from the simple way that Asana works. Unless tasks made are private, everything is accessible to everyone. It also has a very powerful search function, so you’ll never lose track of who is working on what. Because of its simple-but-powerful structure, it can do more than just designate tasks. For example, companies running a Holacracy – basically the opposite of a bureaucracy, employing self-management - use it to define roles and accountabilities.
Innovation
Synonyms: Creativity, Ingenuity
Recommended tool: Balsamiq
Balsamiq is a must-have for anyone that wants to bring their digital ideas to life. It’s so intuitive, a five-year old could use it to wireframe a website, which is why it’s so powerful. People who previously lacked technical knowledge will be forced to work out their idea in enough detail for someone with that knowledge to execute it. A visual representation is always better than a vague-but-innovative dream.
Care
Synonyms: Service, Compassion
Recommended tool: Karmabot for Slack or Disco for Chat
Slack allows you to set up channels and push conversation at a blistering pace. It also supports a wide amount of additions, one them being Karmabot. This app allows you to give karma points to colleagues for their activities, prompting a customizable GIF to pop-up. If you don’t want to invest, Google’s own Chat is an excellent free alternative. Disco serves as the Chat alternative to Karmabot. A nice way to boost employee appreciation within their communication environment.
Passion
Synonyms: Enthusiasm, Fun
Recommended tool: TINYPulse
TINYpulse is an excellent pulse-survey tool that allows you to find out what your employees think of developments in your organization. Employees can grade their happiness, their feelings about the company direction or their productivity – whatever you can and want to quantify. Because TINYpulse is widely used, you can then benchmark these scores overall, or within your industry. You can choose from a standardized set of questions, or insert your own. Next to that you can send "Cheers" to your colleagues for a job well done, a kind gesture or whatever you think is worthy of praise.
While it’s not a tool that cultivates passion itself, it does give you an objective picture of what your employees are thinking. Use it to ask the right questions – how happy are you with your job? How quick is our company to adapt to change? Would you recommend working here to your friends and family? All these smaller questions contribute to the larger whole: how passionate are your employees?
Learning
Synonyms: Continuous Improvement, Knowledge
Recommended tool: (social) intranet
Knowledge walks out the door when good people leave. Retention of employees is one issue, retention of knowledge is another. To maintain a competitive advantage, recording any employees’ know-how is vital. In-house trainings don’t scale well – so what then?
Your intranet is the central place for all information and knowledge in your company. Experienced employees can teach an unlimited amount of colleagues by using the intranet to share what they know. That information turns into knowledge when social features allow employees to directly discuss content on your intranet. It’s also a great place to distribute a recording of that in-house training.
