Our guide to getting your brand values to stick

We are going to say something controversial here, brand values are only useful if staff can recall them, understand how they apply to them and believe in them. Easy right, how hard can that be? Well, we are going to walk you through how we would go about this. Whether you’re a small business with less than ten employees or you have hundreds, there are lots of tried and tested ways of achieving this.

Co-create your brand values with your employees, customers or service users

The best way to get someone to buy into something, is to have them involved in creating them. That is why we think brand values work best when employees, customers or service users are involved in creating or updating them. Your stakeholders including staff will have a really strong view on what your values should be and how these should play out in the real world.

So how do you do this? Run a virtual, in person or hybrid workshop where you ask people to choose from a list of values which ones they think are most important to the organisation and ask them to explain why. Ask them what is missing from that list that they would like to add. Get them to collectively prioritise this down into 5-6 values that your going to explore further.

Then walk them through what this means to them. One thing we’ve learnt over the years is everyone will have different interpretations, so it is worth taking the time up front to come up with some common definition of these values and what they mean collectively. A good way to prompt an initial conversation is to put the value in the middle of a piece of flip chart paper and ask everyone individually to put their definition up there. Then go through them and look at what the commonalities and differences are and narrow this down into one definition. Really explore why people came at it differently.

Once you’ve got that collective understanding of what a value means then start thinking about what actions/behaviours show that staff and the company are living by them. Ask people to complete the sentence: “We show this value when we….”

Get loads of ideas down on paper, as they can always be rationalised down later to make it more manageable for people to remember. Then do the flip side of this. “We don’t live this value when we…”

If you have customers and service users in the room ask them to go around and highlight what behaviours under each value are the most important to them.

Embed it within your HR processes

Key to all of this is that you want to make your brand values the centre of your organisation and its culture. And this means making them super visible. There are loads of places you can make your brand values visible, but here are some starter ideas:

• Staff handbook

• Intranet

• Within your onboarding new staff process

• Appraisals

• Reward and recognition

• Internal staff meetings

• Training and development

Get physical with your brand values

If you have an office space or shop, physical touchpoints are a great option for you. Showcase them in the office, have them on the walls, on the doors in the toilets. Just make them flow throughout the building.

Have a feedback or recognition wall where you share examples and stories of staff that are living and breathing your brand values and well…shout about it.

And if you don’t have a physical space, make sure that you’re building in you brand values into your internal comms throughout the year, not just around appraisal.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our latest blog. Do get in touch if you would like some help creating or updating your brand values.