Company values are just about the single most important thing you can establish and 99% of the time they are pure fluff.
Firstly, all the ones like “be action oriented”, “do the right thing”, “the power of friendship” are all immediately tossed in the bin. A value must be able to be phrased as a trade-off in opposition to something that is reasonable. I’ve never once heard “actually, do nothing,” “let’s do the wrong thing”, or “fuck our coworkers.” At least in a remotely functional company. A good example is the Agile Manifesto. It gets this right by phrasing everything as “A over B.” As in “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Process and tools are reasonable, but given the choice, we’d prefer to prioritize individuals and interactions.
Moving on.
There’s a framework from McKinsey called 7S that I really like. It basically says that a well-functioning company is 7 interrelated pieces that all mutually reinforce each other. 3 hard “S”s -> Strategy, Structure, Systems. 3 soft “S”s -> Staff, Skills, Style. And those 6 all orbit “Shared Values” to make the “7S”s.
The “basic business” case for all of these is mostly self-evident. Where it gets muddy is when you say that something is “valued” and that’s definitively false. So let’s look at a common case.
Example: “Documentation is valued so I don’t know why ours always sucks.” Let’s break it down.
Strategy: Do you strategically plan for it? Is it included in the definition of “Done?” Does it facilitate your planning in any way? Is there an expectation it should be available across the business to learn?
Structure: Does the managerial reporting line in the company have a section carved out for documentation? Are managers asked about the state of documentation at all?
Systems: Is there a singular, maintained place for documentation to live? Is there a process to add updates to it? Index maintenance? How do you find things?
Staff: Do you have a specific role for maintaining documentation? Do you hire around it?
Skills: Do you ask for writing technical writing snippets in the interview? Is it possible to receive a promotion without writing documentation? Do you have feedback groups on how to write better documentation?
Style: Do you have a style guide? What’s the way that your company writes things?
The answer to almost all of these is usually one of “We don’t have that”, “we don’t do that,” or just “no.” In this case documentation is definitionally not a value and it’s no surprise it sucks.
