OPINION: Know when to leave values out of communications

You can’t move for "values" in most organizations nowadays. But why can it seem that over-stretched comms practitioners are being asked to do the job of the senior leadership team?

by Jill Wedge, managing director, Vibrant Communications

Warning! This article is going to take a controversial tack.

I’m not a big fan of the emphasis placed on values within companies. I’m even less of a fan of leaders who foist the "living the values" responsibility onto already busy comms teams rather than better shaping and leading their workforce.

This issue arose during a Melcrum Better Writing workshop recently. Two of the delegates had come along partly to find out how to improve their writing when being asked to get a reference to internal values into everything they produce. Why would they be asked to shoehorn values into every piece of writing? I was as perplexed as they were.  

Another delegate produced a credit card-sized booklet from his pocket and said: “They make us carry ours round with us.” 

The "value from values" hurdle
Force-feeding values to staff is not unusual. I heard a senior director at banking firm talk at a recent conference. She outlined the hefty brand values program the company had instigated and revealed how every piece of comms had to reflect one of their corporate values. And when questioned by the audience, she said "If it doesn’t reflect a value, we don’t use it." What, everything, has to have values in it?

No doubt senior leaders feel they're getting "value" by communicating only stories that mirror the company values. But instead, what they get are frustrated comms teams, worn out with the effort of forcing values into every activity and cynical employees, bored witless by reading how "entrepreneurial", "customer-centric" and "honest" they're supposed to be.

Say what you mean
Writer Lucy Kellaway, author of the amusing Who Moved My BlackBerry? reckons there are about 12 words that are recycled in every company’s values. She points out that the dictionary definitions of "passion" are to do with strong, sexual desire and Christ’s suffering on the cross.

The article goes on to mention a recent job advertisement, where a company sought for its call center: “passionate banking representatives to uphold our values”. Not competent people to follow instructions and answer the phones, she queries?

Plain old common sense
I read with interest the other day that the best way to communicate "living the values" in an organization was to illustrate each with an example.

Therefore, "respect for colleagues" was illustrated by “not turning up late for meetings”. I’m surprised adult workers need to have the anti-values sin of disrespectful tardiness pointed out to them.

I thought it was everyone’s job to turn up on time for meetings, along with replying promptly to phone messages and emails, pleasing the customer, saving – or at least not wasting – the company money, not lying and not moping around like a wet weekend. 

In the common sense, real world where I’ve worked most of my life, good people are generally respectful, customer-focused, honest, work with integrity, get great satisfaction out of what they do and think about how to solve problems for their bosses. But, now, having "values" is a billion-dollar industry with careers and incomes built around their definition and communication. And it’s the biggest case of Emperor’s New Clothes this century.

Any round pegs out there?
Too often, employers hire square pegs and then get internal comms to "beat them" with values in the hope they fit those round holes. I completely understand the need to highlight and spread particular ways of working when merging 2 organizations with different heritages and cultures.

But that isn’t really why companies are spending zillions on creating values and then finding ways to communicate them to an uninterested workforce.

Dick Richards explains the 20-year history of corporate values in his blog. In 1988 Tom Peters and Bob Waterman professed that America’s best-run companies were ...

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