Living organizational values: changing behaviors at scale and avoiding going through the motions
Article Type: Strategic commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 11, Issue 2
Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and its direction for the future
Javier BajerFounding CEO of The Talent Foundation, UK.
Someone in your organization has a vision for how things should be different. If only people were more accountable, collaborative, dependable or some other combination of adjectives, your business would do better. This might be true,but there is a difference between living and breathing values versus merely learning key words to tick the boxes of performance management objectives.
I am not saying that organizations should not have values; of course not. However, as a behavioralist, I know that human behaviors emerge from our beliefs, not from memorized statements. Values should be tools we use to monitor(and drive) the coherence across our organizations’ beliefs, intentions(plans), promises (communication), and actions and behaviors (the policies,processes, structures and tools that conform our day-to-day experiences within our organizations).
Too many organizations have gone through the define-communicate-reward-hope cycle when it comes to their values, and they unavoidably repeat their mistakes with every change of management, often explaining what went wrong with the previous culture change process. Justifications include “having the wrong values,” “communicating ineffectively” or “not measuring behaviors with sufficient rigor.”
Avoiding the pitfalls
Following are some points to consider in order to avoid common pitfalls that organizations fall into when it comes to values initiatives:
Looking for the “right words” can be a distracter
Most people would agree that creating a value-driven culture takes more than coming up with some clever words and definitions. However, how frequently do we see senior executives getting distracted by endless debates on values, as if crafting magic words would create reality? Unfortunately, these exercises are more likely to feed organizational cynicism than they are to create sustainable cultural change.
Organizations make huge efforts through sophisticated undertakings, at times involving thousands of employees, to define and rubber stamp the right list of values. For good or for bad, there is a small list of what “good”looks like when it comes to people at work. We all want workforces to work“ethically,” “together,” “effectively,” “taking ownership” and “putting clients first.” Regardless of the chosen adjectives, when meaning is distilled, we always find very predictable intentions, regardless of culture, industry or geography. No one wants “confusion,”“fear of management” or “corridor politics” as their chosen values.
Communicating values does not automatically drive behaviors
This is rather obvious, but not in the organizational world. We all know how important it is to drink eight glasses of water, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, and exercise for half an hour each day. But do we?
The belief is that if we communicate enough, then people will adopt the right values. Businesses everywhere like to campaign to their employees, as if intense messaging was needed to get people to put customers first next time the phone rings. Internal marketing campaigns have questionable impact when it comes to changing behaviors at scale but because they give a sense of work in progress,they continue to exist so abundantly across our planet. More recently, involving the workforce in discussions around values has become a new best practice, in the hope that involvement creates ownership. Although talking about values may be a pleasant activity, it simply does not drive natural and sustainable behaviors. Let us be honest here: the world would be a very different place if this approach to change had worked well with humans in the past.
Measuring performance and engagement does not make us value-centric
The phrase, what gets measured, gets done, does not always hold truth. The world has been measuring things like hunger, health and revenue for years, and unfortunately there are not too many success stories that link metrics to sustainable outcomes.
Many organizations measure whether people see the organizational values in their colleagues’ everyday actions. At best, what these measurements tell us is the degree by which people are living the values of the business –but they do not do much in terms of moving them up the scale. Knowing how big the gap is does not make it any smaller (and I would even argue the opposite,but that is for another time).
A need for organizational coherence
So, how can we help people live organizational values for real? I passionately believe that in order to have workforces act on specific values we need to focus on the creation of organizational coherence around those values. Latest brain sciences research tells us that people naturally want to do what is right, so our job should be to minimize the confusion of what right looks like in every context, which in turn will release true human (and social) potential.
Unfortunately, coherence is not that common in today’s world of work. For example, in one organization people hear a webcast from their CEO telling them to make customers the number one priority, but their performance management process is too influenced by what their immediate boss thinks about them. As a consequence, they might do little more than develop short-term behaviors driven by fear. Another company asks their sales force to be more connected with the market so they can innovate and rapidly react to changes, but they restrict their use of tools to protect data security in a highly regulated environment. Again, people’s behaviors will be unsurprisingly tactical and inward looking, unlike those suggested by the value statements on the nicely branded posters.
We live in an increasingly complex world, and we should continue to adapt if we are to be competitive in the long run. Therefore, such complexity requires strong minded and courageous teams to police for in-coherences across the various organizational pieces that affect workforce performance. Unless we manage to align the various messages (and I do not refer only to communications here, but to the messages we give through our policies, processes, tools,structures, etc), we will be going through the motions when we talk about values and culture. Ultimately, our job should be to navigate, negotiate, prioritize and implement the necessary coherences so that performance can be released in the direction of the values.
Although uncomfortable for most, we need to challenge our organizations to be clear and consistent on what they stand for (beliefs), what they want(intentions), what they are committing to (promises) and what they actually do(actions and behaviors). Of course this might be a bit too challenging for some. The tried and not successfully tested alternative is to get busy, design some nice campaigns with value statements people can memorize … and hope for the best.
About the author
Dr Javier Bajer is a cognitive psychologist and one of the foremost specialists in leadership and workforce performance. He focuses on what gets people to engage, collaborate and accelerate change, turning the latest behavioral economics research into concrete applications at global organizations such as Accenture, HSBC, Shell and Hewlett Packard. Dr Javier Bajer can be contacted at: javier@workforceperformance.com
