Values Aren’t Values Forever
Back in late 2019 I got to ask (the now late) Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh a couple of questions as part of the Zappos Culture Camp that I attended in Las Vegas. I’d followed his work for a few years and loved his book on workplace culture Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.
This was the guy that refused to sell to Amazon unless he was given continued autonomy over the Zappos culture (Amazon eventually relented to Hsieh’s demands in 2009) and who championed emotional intelligence as the difference between success and failure. He was instrumental in ensuring that everything that Zappos undertook centred around 10 core values:
- Deliver WOW Through Service
- Embrace and Drive Change
- Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
- Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
- Pursue Growth and Learning
- Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
- Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
- Do More With Less
- Be Passionate and Determined
- Be Humble.
These are expanded upon in the organisation’s Oath of Employment (which you can read here), that all staff agree to abide by. And when you visit the Las Vegas campus, the values are literally everywhere (see below).
It’s a great example of how to live values in plain sight and ensure that they are woven into the fabric of an organisation.
And yet, despite my fanboy excitement at meeting Tony, I wanted to ask him a difficult question. So, during the Q&A, I did.
Me: “Tony, the organisation has strong values and it’s great to see them lived in plain sight. My questions is: how often do you change them?”
Tony: “Our values will always be our values. They won’t change.”
It’s hard to disagree with someone who has a great track record in building successful culture, but on this issue I did and do disagree.
Like everything in workplace cultures, values can never be a ‘set and forget’ exercise. As the business grows, as the world changes, as employees’ views evolve, then the values must do likewise.
Granted, values don’t change every year as a vision statement could, but they can never be the same values forever. That would be to admit that nothing will ever change. In that scenario the values will simply stop being lived, because they don’t mean anything to anyone anymore or else are seen as being old, tired or just not relevant.
As an example, I’m currently running values refresh exercises for three organisations and these scenarios could be true for you too:
- One for a newly merged company — this organisation recognised that in bringing two companies together they needed both sets of employees to work together to define a new set of values
- One for a company that recently acquired two new businesses — this organisation wants to ensure that the current values that they have also embody the expanded business and its new employees
- One, because well, their current values are a bit rubbish — this organisation recognises that the exercise they undertook many years ago, now no longer hits the mark for the people that they’re looking to employ.
Once the values are in place, they are translated into cultural norms through the behaviours of staff to uphold them and the agreements that they make about how to work together.
Interestingly, Google doesn’t have values, instead it has Ten things we know to be true. Under the heading they state quite clearly, ‘From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does — and you can hold us to that.
Values are a crucial component of vibrant workplace cultures and potential employees are increasingly looking at them to determine whether it’s a company that they wish to join, or not. If they’re uninspiring or have remained the same despite the evolution of the business, then it could be a sign that the organisation no longer takes them — or worse, their culture — seriously anymore. And that’s worse than having no values at all.
