Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's comes from an Internal Comms Lead in Bristol who asks:

Ahhhh I must be a total nerd because this topic actually makes me so excited. Is it just me that loves big meaty tricky projects like this? And core values is one of those initiatives that can easily go wrong.

When core values are designed well and rolled out properly, they will genuinely shape how a place feels, how people behave, what the culture is. But when this project is rushed or done badly, the values become nothing more than a poster in the kitchen that nobody reads and the values don't actually mean anything.

We were lucky enough to have an event about this topic in The Curious Tribe, hosted by our own tribe member Faye Banks. Faye runs internal comms at Card Factory, a retailer with over 1,000 stores and 10,000 colleagues. Faye is one of the founding members of The Curious Tribe, she joined when I first opened the doors in December 2023 and has been a loyal member ever since. She is absolutely brilliant and she ran an event with us to share how she rolled out a new set of core values in her company.

First, the proof it worked

Before I share her advice, let me show you why it's worth listening to, because Faye is proof that you can launch values successfully and really make them stick.

One of the clearest signs that Faye's approach was successful was when colleagues started using the values' language unprompted in conversations without being asked. People would write in to say "I'm really proud of this thing we're leading the way on" and "we lead the way" is one of the core values. When your people start narrating their own work through the values without anyone nudging them, that's not a campaign anymore, that's culture. You've nailed it.

So when Faye talks about how to make values stick, she's not theorising, she's actually done it. Let's learn from her. Here are a few of the insights from her session that you borrow for your own work.

Insight 1: Values stick when people help build them

Faye's strongest message was about co-creation of the values themselves. Values are infinitely easier to embed when people feel they had a genuine say in shaping them, because co-creation is what earns you trust and adoption down the line. It can't just be a set of words handed down from the top.

I once worked in a company where the leadership team decided they needed a new set of core values, and off they went to a posh hotel for a few days to dream them up with a facilitator. They did not involve any employees. They did not draw on any employee insights or data and survey info. They went into their own little leadership bubble and came back with a truly garbled, high-falutin set of values and they thought they were BRILLIANT. Can you imagine their faces when I road-tested them with employees and had to let them know employees hated the new values and thought they were terrible 🫠

Now back to Faye. Because when she worked on these new core values, she was involved from the start and pushed to have employees deeply involved in the co-creation of the values.

The practical lesson for you: build employee input into the process from the very start. Run employee workshops, ask questions, gather feedback, find a way to get real voices from across the business into the room before the values are finalised. The more your people shape them, the easier your launch will be and the more likely your employees will actually embrace the values.

Insight 2: Test your values before you launch them

Faye shared how important it is to test out the values with groups of employees before the launch day. This can help to mitigate the risk of things going wrong and to catch any glaring mistakes before the launch. This is an easy step to skip because you're probably super busy and this seems like an unnecessary next step, but Faye strongly recommends taking the time for some testing.

Before the values were totally finalised and approved, Faye played the draft values back to small test groups first and asked a bunch of questions like:

• Do these values make sense to you?
• Do they sound like Card Factory?
• Do they match your experience of working here?

This testing phase is the natural extension of co-creation really, isn't it? You involved people in co-creating the values, now you're checking back with them before they're set in stone.

Insight 3: Keep the language simple and easy to understand

Card Factory's values are refreshingly clear, things like "we do the right thing" and "we lead the way." There's no complicated language, no jargon, no abstract corporate waffle. All of the values are easy to understand and very plain.

And every single comms pro knows that keeping things in plain simple language is bloody HARD! Everyone will want to complicate the words and make them longer and more flowery. And before you know it your clean, memorable values have turned into Wuthering Heights.

Faye's approach to keeping the language simple was to rely heavily on the brand's tone of voice as her reference point. Card Factory's whole brand is built on plain, no-nonsense, say-it-as-it-is language, so when anyone pushed for something convoluted, she could simply say "that's not our tone of voice" and that was sort of the end of it. Have you got a company tone of voice you can turn to when your stakeholders want to make the language elaborate? This helps you keep the language simple without making it about your own personal preference.

This is just the tip of the iceberg

What I've shared here is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can learn in Faye's session. The whole thing is recorded and available for playback in the tribe video library, available exclusively to members. In the full recording you'll also learn:

• How Faye split embedding into short-term and long-term moves, the things you can change next week versus the ones that take years to become habits
• How she baked values into hiring, onboarding and performance reviews, including rating people on how they achieve their objectives, not just what they achieve
• How the annual values awards and conference culture slot keep the values alive year after year
• A genuinely clever way to measure whether values are landing, hidden in the patterns of who gets nominated for which value
• The full story of the celebration ritual she created and how she made it stick
• How leaning into your values can help you land your hardest messages, including redundancies

This is exactly the kind of practical, been-there case study that's hard to find anywhere else. And this is what we share in The Curious Tribe.

The Curious Tribe is a global community of internal comms professionals who share their real work; the wins, the challenges, the lessons, the way Faye did here. Members love the community... the tribe has an NPS of +81 and 90% of members renew year after year. People join and they stay.

Want to join us?

We've got loads more events coming up in the tribe over the coming months including:

• Leadership comms
• How to do a DIY channel audit
• Employee listening strategies
• Using AI for change comms
• How to say no to stakeholders

If you work in internal comms, The Curious Tribe was built for you. Are you going to join us?

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS You can find Faye on LinkedIn here, she's smart and ambitious and an all-round wonderful human being. I highly recommend connecting with her.

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

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