Journal 14

Building a great culture with brand values

October 2019

Cultivating your company culture through a strong vision and clear brand values can make for the best platform on which to build a really great culture. 

It’s true that understanding your brand values and taking your team through how to live their work lives aligned to these values can allow everyone to be working on the same page. 

I’ve found that not only is this something that I’ve been asked about various workplaces, but I would often ask myself when going for a new job. You don’t need to spend a long time with someone to get a sense of what the work culture is like. That’s if that employee is truly aligned with the company vision and brand values.

Brand values can inspire and motivate your team to achieve their KPIs, professional goals and aspirations. And they can bring everyone together with a shared vision and sense of belonging. When you belong to a team with a great culture, you feel a part of something bigger.

1. Pinpoint your brand values

Any brand strategy session should include working out what your brand values are. This is as basic a need as knowing what your vision and mission are. Brand values are simple words or statements that describe the very essence of what your business stands for. 

Brand values don’t need to describe what you do, they just need to describe how you do it.

If you’re a company working for good - one of your values should be ‘Ethical’, ‘Contributing to our future’’ or as simple as ‘For good’. If it's important to you that your employees feel empowered and encouraged in their roles, you would look to include something like ‘Empowering’ or ‘Confidence’ as a brand value.

2. Get your employees across your brand values

Once you’ve established what your brand values are, you’ll need to get everyone on board by taking your employees through them with a group session or even providing your new employees with a brand book. Making the session fun and easy to understand can really help to get everyone’s heads around how you are asking them to behave in alignment with the company brand values. 

Everyone from senior leadership to your front office staff should be living up to these brand values in the same way. It doesn’t mean that everyone is a clone. It just means that everyone knows how the brand should come to life and how they should align their work approach to the values. For instance, if one of the values is ‘Be approachable’, you know that everyone should be making themselves approachable and friendly to clients, staff, customers, suppliers and everyone in between. For if they know what they are working towards and what the brand values are, you have something to assess their performance against.

3. Recruiting to align with your brand values

While it can sometimes be hard to tell from a couple of brief interviews exactly how a future employee might perform, you can at least target your interview questions to shed some light on how a prospective employee might align with your company’s brand values. 

Think about how a brand value might apply to their role and mould a question to ascertain how that might approach a situation. 

4. Align your clients with your brand values

Brand value alignment not only applies to who you hire, but it should also apply to who you work for. If you are living up to your brand values then you will attract the right customers, clients and staff. But brand values can also help you determine if a client is a good fit. You wouldn’t work for a mining company if one of your values is ‘Respect for the environment’. If you are finding you are misaligned or not resonating with the audience you want to attract, then perhaps its time to reconsider your brand values or ensure all your communications are reflective of what your brand values are.

5. Maintaining and living up to your brand values

Refreshing your staff with the brand values every so often is not only a reminder on what you are living up to, but can bring everyone together with the same understanding and same encouragement to bring your best self to work everyday. You want them to understand how to approach their roles, as well as what the larger business vision is. 

Make it brief and fun, and don’t force it. Creating a great culture is certainly more than brand values, but they make for a great foundation.