Living the values
In a tough and challenging marketplace, wire and rope manufacturer Bridon needed employees to perform better than ever before. The Bridon senior management team knew it needed to transform company culture to encourage, in particular, creativity, collaboration and customer focus.
First, we worked with the senior team to develop and articulate a draft set of core values that would create a consistent basis for this new culture and define standards of behaviour throughout the organisation globally.
We then ran a series of focus groups with employees in Europe, America and Asia, representing a wide number of countries and cultures, to test the draft values and help bring them to life at Bridon.
These focus groups enabled us to:
- explore the meaning of the values for different functions, nationalities and levels within the corporate hierarchy
- elicit simple statements describing behaviours that embody each of the values
- identify ‘local heroes’ who exemplify the values in action
- find examples of where the values are helping to produce excellent performance
- discover what helps and hinders people in living the values
- get the organisation talking about values with the help of those involved in the focus groups
The outputs of these discussions provided the basis for our advice to Bridon on how they could most effectively embed the values in the organisation. Our recommendations included:
- coaching top management to model the values
- appointing 80 influential people as values ambassadors and giving them tools and support to help embed the values locally
- publicising the values through a communication campaign featuring examples of the values being lived day to day
