What value do your values add?
Over the course of this year, I have undertaken research into the impact of corporate values on people who might consider working for particular organisations. There are actually a surprising number of angles here and it’s a topic that tends to interest academics who specialise in management, marketing and anthropology, as well as my own discipline of business psychology.
Essentially, I was focused on three things.
I wanted to explore the extent to which organisations espouse fairly uniform values. Some authors have talked about these worthy statements posted on websites and trumpeted in brochures as being ‘window dressing’, suggesting they can be bland and fairly meaningless. What if organisations believe that they are distinguishing themselves, while they are actually just parroting the same trite formulas that are embraced by their competitors?
Then, I wanted to know the extent to which differentiated values might prove more attractive to prospective job applicants. Perhaps would-be employees are more easily swayed by businesses that stand out from the crowd with unusual claims or idiosyncratic ways of expressing their value statements?
Finally, I wondered whether people’s perceptions of the values would be affected by knowing who was espousing them. In other words, do I trust a statement from, say, a department store I’ve patronised, but reject a very similar statement from an industrial cleaning company I’ve never heard of?
The importance of congruence
It was quite a lot to unravel. And, as with all academic research projects, my first job was to wade through the literature on the subject to look at previous studies and frameworks related to the topic. These came from a diverse range of specialisms, from social psychology through to employer branding.
One interesting and particularly relevant idea is that of ‘value congruence’. This is the contention — supported, it’s fair to say, by empirical data — that organisations are most effective when the personal values of employees and the corporate values of their employers are in alignment.
If I am a rugged individualist, maybe I identify with an employer who tells me that everyone succeeds on merit and I can get a bonus for my personal efforts. If, on the other hand, I have a more collectivist outlook, perhaps I want to hear that the organisation espouses values of teamwork and mutual support.
This is a topic that is well researched among existing employees of organisations, but I wanted to extend the notion to people who might be looking at businesses from the outside. Prospective job applicants.
Exploring views and impressions
I’d originally come to an agreement with a particular business to conduct face-to-face focus groups with their staff, but — hey — along came 2020. Social distancing and furloughing effectively put and end to that one. Luckily, I’d anticipated some kind of Covid nightmare and had a plan B up my sleeve: focus groups over Zoom with a sample of people from a range of different professions and backgrounds.
All researchers have to acknowledge the limitations of the work they do. There are some disadvantages to online discussions and the assembling a ‘snowball’ sample. The groups were undoubtedly skewed towards people in middle-class, professional jobs. I was nevertheless pleased that participants were reasonably representative of the UK working population in terms of age, gender and ethnicity.
So, how did the discussions unfold?
Well, I built the focus groups around some preliminary research I’d already conducted into the values espoused by a particular group of businesses: those identified as the 100 Best Companies to Work For by The Sunday Times. I figured that as exemplary employers, they might be more likely to publish values on their website and, indeed, the majority did. Sometimes they were overtly described on a discrete page devoted to values, but on other occasions they were articulated on pages related to recruitment or social responsibility.
I analysed the text on these sites and was surprised to find there was a greater degree of diversity in the values expressed than we might imagine. And although I initially grouped them around certain themes, the participants in my focus groups didn’t necessarily observe the same patterns that I did. There was clearly a degree of subjectivity in deciding which values sat naturally alongside one another.
What we think we want and what we actually want
For me, the most interesting revelation from the research at a psychological level was that people in the groups were often openly dismissive of values statements they perceived as bland or generic. But when asked anonymously to choose between values that were more commonplace and those which were more differentiated, they almost invariably opted for the safer, predictable statements.
It’s only possible to speculate here, but my thoughts are that there might be a degree of social desirability bias at play. We like to present ourselves in front of others as being challengers of the status quo or a little battle-hardened and cynical. Bland and familiar values? Who wants those? Privately, we’re more inclined to feel there’s a sense of comfort and stability in the stuff we know and have heard before.
It’s also true to say that when confronted with articulations of values that seemed fairly bizarre and off the wall (‘Defiant — rules schmules’; ‘Everyone’s a builder’; ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’), even the public reaction of participants tended to be one of bewilderment or cynicism. There was very little evidence that cool, radical or avant-garde statements were likely to win plaudits from those browsing for jobs.
Look… who’s talking?
The final piece of the jigsaw was the idea that the business espousing the values might shape people’s views of the values themselves. I showed the focus groups text from various websites, without initially revealing which websites they were from. I measured their reactions to the statements on a scale and then subsequently revealed the company behind them. The participants then had a chance to revise their scores in the light of the new information.
Sometimes, a positive association with a company — for example, a good personal experience of the Indian restaurant chain Dishoom — led to members of the research groups ranking the values higher after the ‘reveal’ of the name. This is perhaps suggestive that a strong corporate or employer brand can influence positively the way your values statements are decoded. (If you’re thinking your values shape your brand, perhaps you should consider the possibility that your brand may actually be shaping perceptions of the values.)
Where ratings were revised downwards after the reveal, it was often because people felt there was some dissonance between the values expressed and the organisation espousing them. This is an issue of authenticity. If, for argument’s sake, an investment bank claimed its values were peace, love and understanding, the likelihood is that people would smell a rat.
So, there it is. A little snapshot, which I hope prompts some thought and discussion. If you’re interested in developing your own corporate values and aligning them to those of your employees and prospective employees, I’m happy to offer support and consultancy. And drawing on my background in marketing communications and advertising, I’m also willing to provide input when it comes to the articulation of your values and the way in which you communicate them internally or externally.
Stand out from the crowd, by all means. But make sure you’re true to who you are.
Phil Woodford is a former advertising creative director, who works as a freelance writer, trainer and lecturer. A course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, he also teaches at University of the Arts London and the private French university network INSEEC U. He holds a degree in sociology from the London School of Economics and a Master’s degree in occupational and business psychology from Kingston University London. Phil co-hosts a weekly news review show on Colourful Radio, broadcast from London’s Africa Centre.
