Establish core values
Hay’s key to a successful culture is establishing a core set of values.
Creating these values and making them an integral part of the culture
shapes the way employees work and interact each day and helps
them better understand the company and its culture.
“Values tend to get overlooked,” he says. “So find out what are the
things that differentiate you, describe what’s important to you and
your employees, and what they can act upon?”
Talk with employees and clients about what they see in you. Hay
got feedback from external partners, clients and employees to determine the company’s values. He says getting feedback from others
was the best way to find out what made dunnhumby different from
other companies.
Once you have that information, summarize it into the few things that
define your company and are believable, realistic and truthful.
“If your employees look at your values and go, ‘I’ve never seen that
here,’ obviously there’s no connection between your aspiration and
reality,” Hay says. “Values have to be recognizable and inspirational,
something that people believe and are important to the organization.”
The values also need to be simple and relevant for employees to
understand them.
“Sometimes, there is a tendency to list 10 or 12 things, but if you
don’t distill them down, how are people going to remember them
well enough to act on them?” Hay says.
Dunnhumby’s culture ended up being based on only four core values: collaboration, curiosity, passion and customer first.
Once you have your values in place, you need to communicate
them to make sure employees understand and live them each day.
Hay not only uses things like monthly company meetings and brown-bag lunch sessions for employees to share thoughts and ideas about
culture, he also has tried to integrate the values into the very fiber of
the company.
For example, he has created an open office environment to reinforce collaboration among employees.
“Our office is completely open plan, no one has an office, and that
includes myself,” he says. “Everyone has the same size desk, the barriers are 12 inches high above your desk, you can’t even get away
from the person next to you. That’s a very deliberate design because
it facilitates communication.”
There are also other areas inside the office, including a café-type
space and open meeting areas, for employees to get together and collaborate.
To reinforce the curiosity value, Hay holds regular innovation sessions for employees to bring forth new ideas or products to help the
business grow.
Regardless of how you try to integrate your values into your culture, be consistent.
“Values are something we talk about every day, they’re not rolled
out for the annual business presentation and put away in a cupboard
for the rest of the year,” Hay says. “You’ve got to continually highlight
great examples of people living those values, reward those people,
and consistently communicate (those values) so that they absolutely, 100 percent become embedded in everyone’s daily thoughts and
actions.
“You’ve got to see a connection between your values and everything that’s going on every hour of every day.”
Hay has created a 360-degree review process that is 100 percent
focused on the values, how they align with the vision and how
employees are meeting them.
“It’s not what you do in your job, it’s a rating by your manager, yourself, your colleagues and direct reports on how you do that job in
terms of those values,” he says. “That gives clear, specific feedback
of what they do well in terms of their behaviors, living up to the values and where they can improve.”
There will be people who achieve or exceed living the values and
meeting goals, ones who live the values but struggle with meeting
some targets, and those who cannot meet them at all. You need to
address the problem and see if the employee will be able to stay with
the company or not.
“If you’re achieving numbers but not living the values, you’re ultimately destroying them,” Hay says. “Behaviors, values and the sense
of purpose that builds an organization are long term, and anyone
who is destroying that is also destroying your long-term value.”
Having a clear set of values from the beginning alleviates some of
those employee problems because you can hire people who meet
those values. For Hay, having the open floor plan is the first filter for
prospective employees.
“Our open plan tends to self-select out the people who care
whether their desk is one size or what chair they have,” Hay says.
“Being clear about that in the interview sets people’s expectations.
You’re either going to find that exciting and liberating or that doesn’t
meet your needs.”
