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8: Reinforce Your Values Culture

The success of a values-based culture relies on how well the values are integrated into the organization, which in turn relies largely on how effective the organization is in communicating the meaning of those values internally and externally. The author claims "there is an observable difference in the quality of customer loyalty" between companies who make a priority of communicating values and those that neglect to do so.

When a company is successful, its values guide the behavior of its employees, which "unconsciously" communicates and reinforces the values in their interactions with others in a business context. They do not merely know the values, nor merely talk about them, but live them. But to achieve this success, the employees must know what the values are and what behaviors support them - in the same way that a good habit must begin as a conscious and deliberate choice.

For that reason, communication is critical. A values blueprint that sits in a drawer has no impact on the organization - it must be known before it can be practiced, and it must be practiced before it becomes habit.

The values team that developed the blueprint needs to develop a strategy for communicating the values, internally and eternally. This is where marketing a corporate communications expertise is of the greatest importance: your values are your brand.

Traditionally, corporate communications has been regarded as top-down (management to employees) and inside-out (company to customers or public). But to be effective, communication must be two-way: it should be a channel for leaders to hear from their employees and the company to hear from the public, not just the other way around. (EN: This calls to mind the widespread failure of social media - firms that speak but do not listen.)

Recall that you cannot force culture; you can only create an environment and encourage it along. You cannot make employees believe any more than you can make customers buy. There is a similar quality to communication: you cannot force employees to communication, but you can create an environment in which communication can take place and encourage it along. Firms that attempt to dominate or control channels of communication prevent communication from taking place at all.

The author refers to a study of corporate communication (Towers Watson, 2009) that suggests that firms with the most comprehensive communication efforts have a 47% higher return to shareholders over a five-year period than firms with the least comprehensive communication.

It's suggested that "silence signals indifference" and that communication is an Achilles heel for many organizations.

Communicate Up, Down, and Backwards

When a firm's leadership is not speaking, people listen to whomever else is. And left to its own devices, the grapevine produces vinegar.

Leaders therefore must be communicative on a regular basis, but at the same time avoid overwhelming the audience with too much information. This is where information graphics and dashboards can quickly convey information. But even when information cannot be pared down, it should be concise as possible.

Employees are occupied with their duties - they do not have several hours, and many days do not have several contiguous minutes, to listen to you rattle on.

Communication should be focused on the needs and interests of the audience, not the speaker. What is easiest for the leadership is not always the most effective for reaching the audience.

The author proposes a four-step plan for communications:

Step 1: Develop a Set of Key Messages

Key messages are developed to be used consistently in all communications. They will generally be designed to accomplish certain goals:

• Link the core values to the mission and vision
• Emphasize that the values were selected by an inclusive process
• Explain the values and their definitions
• Suggest the relationship of values to specific behaviors
• Indicate how values drive practical processes such as recruitment, hiring, compensation, and retention of employees

It's particularly important to be consistent in communicating about core values: a "key messages document" is useful in keeping messages on track, and any prepared communication should be reviewed against it.

Step 2: Get Commitment from Senior Leadership and the Board

The author recommends having the values team consult with each senior leader individually, rather than as a group, to ensure you gain their commitment to the key messages. It is not sufficient to get them to nod along, but to consider the ways in which their position and authority can be applied to developing and communicating the values. Most importantly, they should consider ways in which they can lead by example.

Step 3: Cascade to Operations, Staff, and the Front Line

Communications must cascade within the organization: the values should be communicated by top leadership, but also by division and supervisors in a consistent manner to the front-line employees.

If the message they receive from their direct supervisor contradicts something that was said by the CEO, the values are ambiguous and lose credibility. The entire leadership team must be in agreement.

This often means training the front-line leaders in the values and getting their buy-in as well.

Step 4: Anticipate and Minimize Resistance

When introducing a new values blueprint, you can expect a certain amount of resistance. This is especially true in instances in which a firm that has damaged its credibility is seeking to regain it: people do not forget the past and start with a blank slate, but must gradually regain their confidence. A few tips are provided:

First, encourage employee involvement in communications. Peers have more credibility than superiors because they are people with whom your employees can identify, and they do not generally suspect ulterior motives. Solicit stories from employees to use in communicating the values.

Make values a regular part of meetings. Tell stories about people who are living the values. Give recognition to "values stars" where it is germane. Rewarding an employee is important to that individual, but seeing someone else rewarded has a strong impact on others.

Communicate the values frequently. Do not assume that once you have announced and explained your values, that the job of communicating them is done. Repetition helps reinforce and remind employees of the values and their continued relevance.

At the same time, do not let values communications become spam. A constant bombardment becomes a nuisance and seems disingenuous. Communicate values when they are germane to the topic of a necessary communication.

Creating an artificial and formal forum in which employees can talk about the values is an awkward but necessary first step. This is in the nature of habituating them to communicating about values, and it will take time before talking about values becomes a natural and comfortable part of every interaction.

Values Rebranding

Simply stated, your values are your brand. You cannot be inconsistent in what you say to employees and customers, nor create an internal perception that is in conflict with your external communication. Any attempt to do so will damage your credibility with both audiences.

(EN: it's a bit ironic, then, that most organizations have different teams for internal and external communications that are in entirely different silos, and you have to go two or three steps up the corporate ladder before there is a manager who is common to both departments. It seems designed for dissonance.)

When you refocus the values of your organization, the messages and the language used to communicate about values will be very different to what it had previously been, and you must carefully consider how the audience will perceive the change.

Of importance: make a clean break with the past. If the change is made slowly, there will be times when different sources of information are saying different things, which harms your credibility.

Instead, your values team should work closely with marketing and corporate communications to craft the message. It will take a coordinated campaign to all audiences, in all channels. This will seem stiff and artificial at first, but it will become natural over time.

Some random bullet-points follow:

• Consider how your new values will be reflected in both positive and negative news. Good news can be composed at a more leisurely pace, but it is often crisis communications that get more attention and are more carefully scrutinized.
• Decide how often you will provide formal communications. Too often is almost as bad as too rarely. Daily reminders become a sort of wallpaper.
• Remember that your objective isn't merely to tell people about your brand, but to make them believe in it.
• Every message communicates values, even those that are not specifically about them. Any message should be vetted carefully, doubly so when it is sent under the leader's name.
• Intranets and newsletters are good places to show the new values and behaviors in action by telling stories about employees who are living the values and the positive results they have achieved.
• Leverage social media. No specific advice is given, only the statement that some of the author's largest clients make extensive use of tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Employees give considerable attention to any communication that mentions compensation. Any message or conversation has excellent potential to convey values.
• The communications team should compile a comprehensive list of "touch points" here there is any contact between customers, employees, and the public.
• Consider communications from the perspective of the audience: what you intend to say is not always what is heard, nor is in interpreted as intended.
• Bring your brand to the family. Letters to the home, or DVDs intended to be watched at home, involve the family in coaching the employee. Family members should also be involved in as many recognition celebrations as possible.
• Be attentive to communications with departing employees. A good parting ensures that the employee will remain enthusiastic about your brand, rather than becoming a (highly credible) detractor.
• Train employees for values, not just skills. A good training exercise is role-play in a situation where there is a potential for profit by betraying the values.
• Communications must start off as heavy-handed but can become more subtle over time. This includes both the introduction period for the new values blueprint as well as the onboarding process for new employees.
• Be attentive to communications among employees. A sign that your values have taken root is when people start using the language and terms that you used to communicate values in situations where they do not feel they are being watched.
• The manner in which you communicate your values is important. The author gives an example of a firm that used a cartoon mascot to communicate to employees - in other firms with a more reserved culture, this would be dismissed as unbearably condescending.
• Use a "big bang" event to launch the new value blueprint - to make a prompt change, you must reach all employees at once with an attention-getting campaign.
• Make sure to devote significant resources to launching values. A quiet rollout will not be as effective or as credible, and till end up going nowhere. Additionally, investment speaks volumes: The audience perceives, often correctly so, that a firm that does not invest in values does not believe in values.

Next, the author presents some of the early warning signs that a rebranding effort is not being successful, and may be headed for failure:

• Values are weaponized. When the values are used to manipulate employees (if you don't do as I say, you are not living the values), the firm is abusing the very concept of values.
• Rumors become rampant. Rumors flourish in the absence of information, or when the things people are told contradict what they actually see. Management has failed to communicate, or to establish credibility.
• Silo defenses. Where different groups form conflicting agendas, it is a symptom of conflicting values. Management has failed to get them all on the same page.
• External pretenses. When a company feels the need to maintain a different impression on customers and the public by manipulating the media (deceptive advertising, dishonesty with the press), its behavior is out of order with its values. This could be that the values are poorly defined, or merely that management is not living up to the values.

Give Authority to Communicate and Ameliorate

Holding an employee responsible for results while meanwhile preventing him from achieving those results is the quickest way to frustrate and demoralize him. Companies often prevent employees from succeeding by denying them the resources or authority necessary to achieve.

Simply stated, values-based metrics require you to delegate more decision-making authority to the front-line employees: give your people the authority to rectify any situation in which standard procedures cannot achieve a desirable outcome, particularly when customer service is impacted.

The author uses the example of a restaurant chain whose values include hospitality and passion. To act on these values, employees must be authorized to do whatever is necessary to treat the customer well - even when it means going above and beyond their normal duties. When they do so, this becomes a success story.

For this chain in particular, there was an incident where a customer recovering from a medical procedure made a Facebook comment about craving their food but being unable to go to the restaurant. Employees noticed this post, and the very same day, they delivered an order to her house along with a get-well gift card. The customer sent an e-mail to the company, gushing praise. The cost of this gesture was minimal - a free meal and the time to deliver it - well worth the positive results and a "success story" that could be distributed throughout the company to reinforce the values.

Of course, there is a fine line between going the extra mile for customers and being wasteful of company resources, which must also be conveyed. In companies that provide profit-sharing plans to front-line employees, it is understood that any action they take that entails additional expense reduces their own pay, and employees can be coached to consider the long-term value of such gestures - whether a give-away will win more business in the long run.

Operations managers have long been vested with the authority to make such decisions - but if you want employees to have passion and take initiative, the authority must be delegated to them to take action, reactive and proactive, without having to beg permission.

In terms of reaction, "there is nothing more powerful than a quick apology to get a customer to come back." However, some organizations discourage employees from even making a simple apology for fear that it is admitting guilt and will open the door to legal action. This creates an even more costly problem: dissatisfied customers complain publicly about their mistreatment, which has a far greater cost in terms of damaged reputation and lost revenue.

The author advises firms to give employees specific authorization for reasonable accommodations. For example, you can authorize any employee to offer a gift certificate for a small amount. Monitoring the use of the system is important: an employee may be abusing the system to give freebies to their friends, or customers who learn that they will be given a benefit for complaining will seek out or invent reasons to complain.

By keeping track of employees' use of freebies, you should be able to identify when an individual is abusing the privilege and giving away too much. As well, you can also identify those employees who are not doing enough. In either case, some coaching will be helpful in correcting the behavior.

By keeping track of customers' receipt of freebies, you should be able to recognize a person who is complaining just to get a gift, and curtail that behavior as well. You should never dismiss a customer, even if their record seems suspicious, but instead offer a sincere apology without a gift, unless it's clear from the details of the situation that you really did "screw up" again.

Ask and Listen

Unless you have asked your customers what they want, you will never really know. Companies can make very costly mistakes that damage the customer experience if they make assumptions.

For example, JetBlue sent a survey to six customers on every flight, asking them "what is one thing you would change?" In the first year, they found that many customers complained about the coffee being served on flights. It was particular shocking because the company had upgraded, at some expense, to upscale gourmet coffee. By downgrading to their preferred brand (Dunkin Donuts coffee), the firm saved six figures in costs every year, and the complaints about the coffee stopped.

Customer surveys are fairly common, and they are often done badly. One problem is that surveys are not done immediately after a customer has used your service. Another problem is that the questions do not solicit actionable information: it's a vague rating without an identifiable connection to employee behavior.

Surveying employees is also important. The greatest source of employee frustration is impediments to being able to do their job well, and there's no better way to identify problems with a firm's policies and procedures than to get direct feedback by those who are impacted.

In either case, just surveying without taking action to affect the results is pointless. Customers whose complaints are unheeded get the sense that the firm does not care about them. This is even more true of employees, who experience the same problem every day.

A hotel-chain CEO is quoted: "Our philosophy of communication is to listen twice as much as we talk." You learn nothing by talking, and only by listening do you truly gain insight about the customer's desires.

In terms of communications, you should talk about your values, and then listen for the response. The feedback you get indicates the degree to which the other party, employee or customer, believes your values are appropriate and that you are successful in living up to them. This information is critical to successfully developing and instilling values.