Why do you think Values are important to Business success?
A positive and strong company culture is really important to Business performance. Proactive initiatives such as having well defined Values play a key part in any company culture. At Infectious Media, we believe that clear Values are just as important as business objectives and KPIs, for example. Too often they get de-prioritised as a ‘nice-to-have’, as opposed to being something that is essential.
Having a company culture is an organic process, and we are proud of the culture that has been naturally cultivated by our People within the Business over the years. But it also helps to have initiatives that support culture - and this is where Values come in.
Values are particularly important as a business grows and you have more diverse teams and global offices. Though we are doing different work in our teams and our offices across the globe, the company culture and Values are what brings people together around a common cause.
Our Values are all about how we do things here at Infectious Media. They help a new employee know what to expect. Clients find Values important as it helps them to partner with a Business that prioritises the same things as they do, or one that works in a similar way to them. We are increasingly finding that prospective clients are very keen to know more about the company culture - our Values allow us to explain who we are, in an easy to understand way.
Tell us about the new Values at Infectious Media - what are they and how did you come up with them?
We have four new Values:
We’ve learnt from past experience that defining Values should be a collaborative effort. It shouldn’t be decided by management only. When we started reviewing our Values, Infectious Media already had a strong culture and some Values in place. As we have expanded rapidly over the past few years - both in headcount and number of offices - this exercise was more about resetting our Values than starting from scratch. So what we did was essentially to review what we had, and simplify.
We used various data sets in our review. This consisted of historical data, such as info from past awards nominations that people had made - which told us what people intrinsically valued in their colleagues. We also conducted a full company survey about what people value both at work and in their personal lives - we feel it is important to align the culture of a company not just around work principles, but life principles too. Then we created a Values committee of around six people, who represented different areas of the business and different markets, and then we did some serious brainstorming with lots of Post-It notes to find the common themes. When we had a shortlist we invited the co-founders to join in, to bring what we had to life and help shape the Values into more than just corporate lingo - we didn’t want our values to be generic, we wanted them to resonate with who we are at Infectious Media; to represent our unique DNA.
The final stage was a team building activity off-site with all staff, based around our newly formed Values. The purpose of this was to embed and bring them to life. We wanted our People to associate our Values with tangible, day to day behaviours that we are all able to demonstrate.
How can your People demonstrate these Values - both those currently employed, and those looking to be hired?
We’ve worked closely with our People team to translate our Values into day-to-day behaviours that are positively demonstrated around the workplace. “We are straight talkers” is a good example. This is about being a great communicator, open and transparent with our teams, clients, suppliers. Something as simple as making a great contribution to a team meeting or running an effective client meeting would be a demonstration of this value. Another example is “We never stand still” - this is about challenging the status-quo - in the workplace that might look like identifying a process that doesn’t work, right through to designing a new piece of technology, or suggesting a change to a campaign.
For those who are interested in working with us; we are always looking for strong fresh talent at IM and our values help us identify cultural fit at interview stage and also helps the candidate to gauge who we are and whether or not our culture will work for them too!
Looking ahead, how do you think these IM Values will help our People and our Clients?
In a fast moving business like Infectious Media, there is often no rule book, because we are doing brand new things every day. Whilst that is exciting it can also be daunting. So having a values framework gives people a reference point on how to make the right decision in new and unfamiliar situations. It’s about making good choices and contributing to a positive working environment where Well Being and consideration for others are fundamental to how we operate. We want our people to be accountable and to care.
Looking to the future - we are only going to get bigger. We believe having company Values will help maintain our culture in the years ahead. We hope that our Values will help our people work together, to care, to give honest feedback and to ensure we are always developing and moving forward.