Corporate values. If you have to think about them you wouldn’t know where to start. For a small business, the corporate values are close to someone’s own personal values.
Why are they important?
Corporate values are just another characteristic of your organizational profile. Knowing them gives the opportunity to facilitate the communication in your organization. Before you could benefit from this, you should invest in making these corporate values explicit.
You might however not be interested in spending too much time doing this. Values are said to be “soft?and therefore not as easy measurable as a variable like the return on investment (ROI) is.
If the corporate values are not communicated or you may want to know whether they should change, than you could setup a workshop. Starting from scratch is the best way. In that case you are not hindered by a path that is already clearly defined. It takes time though and it is difficult to align everybody with a shared view.
Less intensive is to select the values you think are most appropriate out of an existing list. If you have this done by different people from different areas in your organization, or even within a team, you can swiftly setup an average list of values that are "widely" accepted.
We have such a list you can freely benefit from. The next thing you might check is whether the values are in line with the style of your organization.
And then: back to work and follow them.
Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.Also available: a free corporate values assessment
