Does your design studio need (better) company values?
The phrase “company values” brings many creatives out in a cold sweat. It conjures up the most excruciating parts of corporate culture – a world of forced-fun team building exercises and training sessions like that one in The Office.
But studies show that companies who create meaningful values, and commit to bringing them to life in the day-to-day experience of their employees, do better. They’re more productive, more innovative and retain their staff.
I know this, because last year I co-authored a book about company values with Dave Greasley, the owner of Sheffield-based studio 3800.
Values, it’s clear, have real value. And yet, 50% of people who work in a company which has a set of values, can’t remember what they are.
Part of the problem, Greasley explains, is that, “Most companies set them and forget them.”
Many leaders create a list of words that are inoffensive, unarguable and vague. Words like integrity, excellence, collaboration and respect. They mean everything and nothing, and so have little bearing on people’s real experience in that business.
But to harness their true potential, leaders need to take values more seriously. “For them to stand a chance, we need to give values as much time and consideration as we would our new website, or our financial targets,” Greasley explains.
Creative vs corporate
There is an added complication in design businesses. For some people, values, or the way they have traditionally been presented, feels totally at odds with the spirit of creative work.
This creates an “added pressure” on design businesses looking to create meaningful values, Interstate founder Jayne Connell explains.
“The challenge is to choose principles that resonate with a creative mind while also shaping the more grown-up, structured side of business: appraisals, career pathways and operations,” she says.
But balancing these two sides of the business while creating a set of studio values is well worth the time. By setting expectations, values can explain and encourage the culture that design leaders want to build. They can speed up decision-making, by empowering all employees to make well-considered calls within the framework set out by those values.
And they are especially useful in times of transition – or in fact crisis – to re-affirm what the business stands for and how it operates.
When Spencer Ryan stepped up as the new CEO of Vault49 recently, she worked with founders Jonathan Kenyon and John Glasgow to re-focus the team on its values.
“At pivotal moments, values act like a compass,” Ryan says.
“When I became CEO, we built our values into a strategic foundation – that gave me a platform to lead from and gave the team clarity on where we’re going. They also became a clear decision filter for me on where to focus the studio’s energy.”
Discovering your values
Like many businesses, Vault49 created its values by going back to its origin story. As Kenyon points out, this is a familiar approach that design studios take with their clients, teasing out the DNA which can link past, present and future.
“Studios are brands like any other, and the strongest brands root their values in their origin story,” he explains. “Ours came from our street art origin, where hustle, play, and swagger weren’t abstract ideas – they were a daily reality. Without that link back to the beginning, values risk becoming borrowed language.”
That translates very directly into Vault49’s values, one of which reads: “Vault49 was born from street-level culture. From the start, we’ve been grounded in community, unafraid to take risks, and driven to celebrate the beauty we saw in the world. Today, that same street-level lens guides how we see, think, create, and hire.”
But before diving into what your values should be, leaders need to be clear on what they want them to achieve.
As Gareth Atkinson, head of brand and partnerships at Mr B & Friends explains, “Values can play one of two roles for brands, but they can’t play both.
“They can reinforce who you are and where you are – in this instance, their role is to anchor and articulate elements of the employee experience. Or, they can be used to push you forward to where you’re trying to go. In this instance, their role is to connect employee mindset, decision making and behaviour to the company strategy.”
In this way, values can be used to cement a studio culture that’s already working well, or they can be used aspirationally to make changes that the leaders want to push.
This is an important distinction which shapes not only the output, the final list of values, but also the process for creating them. For example, if a studio wants to use values to drive a new culture, they may use employee input more sparingly than a company that wants to capture and codify how things currently work.
Understanding who you are
Patrick Duffy, the former executive creative director at Dice, is in the midst of creating the values for his new studio, Tonight.
“For me, it’s about understanding yourself before you start to speak to the world,” he says. “So I began by writing a business plan – not the sexiest exercise, but hugely useful in helping me understand what Tonight’s point of difference is in this overcrowded creative world. This was essential to understand before we go to values.”
Most people think four or five values is the maximum. But Richard Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Brandon Consultants, thinks “people can’t recall more than three” and Duffy agrees – “Like musketeers, values tend to move in threes.”
One of Tonight’s values is “Stay True,” which Duffy thinks acts as a reminder to his team about why, in a crowded and competitive landscape, he wanted to start a new studio in the first place.
“The most important thing for me is that we remain true to our goal of providing work that truly stands out – that we are genuinely an alternative choice,” he says. “’Stay True’ should always remind us of that ambition. And it’s also a banging Ghostface Killah track.”
Getting creative with values
Once studios have honed in on the core ideas they want to enshrine in their values, that’s where the creativity should kick in.
No business should really be falling back on those meaningless one-word lists of values, but especially creative studios, who know more than anyone the power of cut-through messaging.
A lot of values will end up coalescing around similar themes, but the best leaders find interesting ways of communicating them.
So for New York-based Sister Mary studio, commitments to empathy and diversity become, “a sisterly soul” and “devoted to diversity of thought.”
Founder Leigh Chandler worked on them with strategist Emily Penny, and she loves the “playfully religious tone that Emily injected.”
One of How&How’s company values is “Total Team Spirit” which is loosely inspired by the 1970s Dutch philosophy of Total Football. In that context, players moved fluidly between positions on the pitch. And although co-founders Cat and Rog How aren’t big football fans, that concept felt relevant to the culture they want to build.
“We want everyone in the team to feel connected to and supported by everyone else, and also open-minded enough to take up any position they need to at a given time,” Cat How says. “This could be as simple as helping the studio manager unload the dishwasher or take the bins down, or jumping in to help a fellow designer on some animation work.
“No-one is too big or important to do the small things in the agency, and when everyone mucks in together, then that is when the magic happens,” she explains.
The key of course is to make the values as memorable as possible, because the more memorable they are, the more likely they will actually impact people’s day-to-day behaviour.
Memorability can also be built into the way values are presented to the team. The pointless PDF is the route to avoid here.
The Browser Company turned its values into a beautifully-written and evocative road-trip essay. Amy Bedford commissioned this great animation to communicate PALS’ studio values.
And in 3800’s Sheffield studio, there is a stone chair marked with personalised etchings from different team members. It represents one of 3800’s values – “Own your seat at the table.”
“In our case, our values became four little brands,” Greasley explains. “Each has their own personality and identity. Each needed a campaign to drive them home and each one needs ongoing comms to stay engaging.”
Actions speak louder than words
But however clever the language, or creative the delivery, success rests ultimately on how well, or not, they shape the culture.
“It’s actually not about the values,” Greasley admits. “It’s the behaviours and actions that sit beneath the values that really matter.
“If your people don’t have the capability, opportunity or motivation to enact these behaviours, it really doesn’t matter what fancy words you chose at the company off-site.”
Richard Taylor agrees. “Brand values are only worth their salt if they inform how you make decisions. Design agencies all too often create their own brand strategy, plaster the values on the wall, and then don’t live by them.
“You need to make your values part of the fabric of your business, part of its soul.”
Values need to show up very practically in the way a business runs. They should inform the hiring process, and form part of annual reviews, to directly shape how teams are built and developed. They can underpin mundane, but significant, policies around things like expenses and annual leave.
At Interstate, Jayne Connell breaks the studio values down into practical explainers for junior and senior employees.
So for “Being Intentional,” junior employees would be expected to demonstrate, “curiosity, asking thoughtful questions and showing focused learning,” while more senior team-members should, “model being intentional by guiding others with vision, empathy and accountability in the decision-making process.”
At Vault49, this commitment to making values practical means they largely avoid the v word altogether.
“We frame values as actions so they’re lived, not abstract,” Spender Ryan explains. “Otherwise, they risk becoming just words on a page.”