How To Live and Breathe Your Business Values (And Why It Matters) By Georgia Kirke
Does your business walk its talk when it comes to living and breathing its values?
It’s useful to think of your business values as guiding principles. When you run your business true to your chosen values they positively impact your brand, your reputation and give your target audience a flavour of what it would be like to work with you.
If you showcase your business in a certain light and this is not evidenced through the customer journey you shatter trust and dilute your reputation, both of which will likely impact your bottom line.
Your business (and clients!) will benefit if you invest the time to get clear on your business values, how they shine through, and which areas need focused attention.
At WBR our company values are:
- Openness: keep an open heart and mind.
- Reliability: show up on time with a level head and do what we say we’ll do.
- Positivity: where there’s a will we’ll find a way.
- Momentum: we bring innovation, balance and drive to every project.
- Quality: we treat our clients’ content as if it’s our own.
- Conscientiousness: we lead with our unique, individual capabilities to further our clients (and ourselves).
- Ease: we streamline our expertise into simplified processes to make our services easy and fun!
It’s quite popular for a company to list its values on its website, in recruitment adverts or promotional material; some workplaces have them stencilled on the wall, but if values are only given lip-service it’s easy for them to be forgotten (which reflects negatively on your business).
Build the values in
Your business values need to be evidenced by action.
In his book The Perfect Practice (a post-covid guide for financial advisers), WBR author David Batchelor shared a story about his daughter’s trip to Tokyo Disneyland. During her trip part of The Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride broke down, but instead of it being a frightening experience the Disneyland cast members (how they refer to their staff) made it all fun. Disneyland values safety, being courteous and making things fun so David’s daughter was escorted safely off the ride by a cast member dressed as a cowboy.
Instead of the mechanical fault becoming an issue, it became part of a great and memorable experience that clearly demonstrated Disneyland walked its talk.
Superficial values
If your website claims that your business is “the best provider” or “number one service for X” you’ve set a high expectation. If that value is not reflected in the customer journey and you become unreliable, disorganised or chaotic you are immediately cultivating doubts in the minds of your prospects. If you do find yourself on the receiving end of negative feedback or a bad review, use it to learn and make positive changes.
Your values need to be more than nice sounding adjectives; they need to mean something to you and your team (and by extension your clients). It pays to define them then live and breathe by them.
10-second takeaway
Does your business operate true to its values? Where does it excel? Or, is there an area that you recognise is ripe for improvement? Think about how you and your team could integrate your company values into your daily practices so that they become second nature. Pop into the Facebook group and share your thoughts.
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