News
28.01.2009
Added value in the company
Binding values in the business world are on everybody’s lips. No surprise really. For in a climate of a blatant abuse of trust by major business protagonists and whole economic systems there is a growing need for binding and reliable sets of values as crash barriers in the day-to-day life of a company.
Even if companies themselves would certainly prefer to begin with value processes in “quiet” times, the call for values in times of major entrepreneurial upheavals is becoming louder. Values create orientation. They foster identification. They carry decisions.
Decisive to the success of value processes is close interplay between communications, human resources, corporate strategy and the management team – headed by the senior executives. Only when values are consistently dovetailed with the strategy in this manner, can they successfully be anchored and develop their full impact in the day-to-day life of a company. Value processes always go through the same phases therefore:
1. The content
First of all it is necessary to lay down and condense the established basic values on which the corporate culture has been based to date. These are then weighted and prioritized. The result is a “values corridor”, which reveals the culture that is actively supported, yet which also makes its deficits visible. In this phase it is the top management that is called on, above all.
2. The discourse
Participation is an essential success factor if values are to develop a motivating and identity-forming impact on employees and senior managers. This is why a wide-ranging discussion of the result of the inventory is the next stage. This is not an attempt at a misplaced bottom-up democratic process – which hierarchy levels and how many participants are involved has to be decided on individually at each company, and is ultimately also an expression of the existing corporate culture.
3. The operationalization
At the end of the discourse is a constructive consensus: The guiding values of the company. This is where the role of communications is most strongly felt when addressing stakeholders – but not in the form of especially lavishly designed brochures and booklets explaining the values. The laying down of a code of values in black and white and the distribution of the corresponding brochures to all employees does not mean that there has been even the slightest amount of implementation. Now it is rather a question of allowing the defined values to become visible in the day-to-day corporate world, making them tangible, and ensuring they are a conversation topic.
4. The daily routine
The bulk of the responsibility here lies with the HR department. The anchoring of values in the corporate reality is essentially dependent on these being made tangible, measurable and verifiable in concrete instruments for personnel management. If the values have become part of the day-to-day corporate world, the communication has to reflect their “existence” time and again, namely with its entire repertoire of instruments.
In the event of queries
Andrea Bergbold
A&B ONE Kommunikationsagentur GmbH
Wiesenhüttenstraße 11
60329 Frankfurt/Main
Tel.: 069 / 92010-287
Fax: 01805 / 22 32 85
E-mail: agentur@a-b-one.de
 
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