Making Company Values Real

As with any company of over 3000 people we were concerned about making our company values real and not just words on a wall.  To further complicate the matter, we are split across eight European countries and have five operating languages!

Our goal was for all of our people to fully embrace our company values and to make them an irreplaceable part of our culture. It’s now over 18 months since we launched our company values.  We thought it would be the perfect opportunity to take a look back at how things are going.

The reason we launched values was to support a consistent set of behaviours across each of our sites. It was also to give our managers and supervisors some supportive tools for managing a diverse staff base.

We were conscious that in order for values to resonate with our staff they had to be developed from within the teams. They also had to be relevant to the myriad of cultures and social backgrounds that we are fortunate to have on each of our sites.  In order to do this, we ran multiple workshops across Europe with our teams at all levels of the organisation.  By distilling the feedback, we were able to come to the five key values that made sense for us.

Developing our Company Values

We came up with the acronym SMART with each letter representing an essential value.

S– Safety, it’s our focus.

M– Make it Simple, it’s how we operate.

A– Advancement, it’s what we do.

R– Respect, it’s who we are.

T– Team Work, it’s what we believe.

These five values underpin who we are and how we operate as an organisation.

Once our values were developed, we needed some tools to roll out the program.  We developed a framework and also a video about the values.  These were sent to each of our sites.  Our values are printed on each person’s lanyard, are on the walls of the rooms our teams work in and every single new staff member is trained on them.

To further promote our values, we hold monthly values awards which recognize individuals in our teams or entire teams that really embody the CCS company values.

We publicise these on our Facebook page and hold events each year to recognize and reward the recipients. We focus on values at each of our management and supervisory training days which also allows us to encourage making them real in our workplaces.

So, looking back on the last 18 months, over 80 people have received a Values Award, and every staff member knows the company values. Our people are constantly exposed to our values from the cleaning rooms to the CCS lanyards that are worn as part of the uniform.

It’s really great to hear our managers and supervisors talk about the company values and send us photos of staff who have received the awards!

For a company of our size, there are minimal staff relations issues, this is down to many factors, but our company values play a central role in this. Our teams really believe in and embrace our values and that’s what makes them such a success!