In 2019, a fast-growing new age digital technology firm approached The Catalyst to firm up its Values and Culture Framework. The company was founded in the year 2007 and has now grown to a thriving 1200 people organization. The organization owes its growth to the values it holds dear. As they continue to grow bigger, they consciously want to spell out these values that have been at the core of their success and make it a culture and a habit in the young and rapidly growing employee base.
The process started with detailed discussions with the 4 founders as they had already identified 9 broad key values through internal and external surveys. From there on The Catalyst team took charge and chalked out a 3-step process to accomplish the project.
First, deep dive into existing behaviours. This was accomplished by
brainstorming with 25 leadership team members. The session was uniquely designed where each member ranked the values, identified must have and good to have behaviours for each value and recalled stories when they lived those values. Harvesting real life stories lived by the team members from the leadership team was a unique and refreshing experience for them which helped them connect with the whole purpose of driving this initiative. These behaviours and stories were further fine tuned to come up with the final Core Value framework by removing overlaps and redundancies.
Second, creating a communication plan for organization wide
adoption of values framework. The idea was to launch it for all the employees in an engaging and exciting way. The communication plan targeted the ‘Unveiling of TTN Core Values’ at two levels. At the first level, the Leadership team members were familiarized with the Core Values Framework and the second level was an all employee launch. The plan was not to just launch the Values for once which is usually the practice in most organizations. A Core Values handbook and a monthly communication calendar was created which would prompt the employees to share their stories related to the organization values. The organization would harvest stories related to each of the values every month and would recognize value champions among all the employees. This would set clear examples of expected values and behaviours at the organization and develop a culture built on the identified core values.
Third phase was the actual launch. In March 2020, the Core Values
were first rolled out at the Leadership Summit where all the leadership team members were present. The roll out was done in the form of a game – Value Card Game. The game prompted the team members to enact, draw, tell a story or think and describe a value role model. The game was immersive, played in various rounds and encouraged the participants to self reflect, recall and express themselves through creative ways. This ensured that not only the employees remember the values forever but also they have indepth understanding of what each of these values mean in the organization context. For all employees launch, the same game was used and was played by all the employees across the organization at one time in groups of 5 under the observation of Leadership Team members and The Catalyst.