Announcing company values is one thing. Ensuring they are lived and enacted is another.

It’s common for organizations to spend the majority of their time, energy, and resources on the ‘what’: what will our new company values be? It’s also common to not spend enough time, energy, and resources on a more challenging and complex aspect, the ‘how’: how will we get our employees to behave in a new way?

After their first attempt launching company values proved unsuccessful, Financial Technology company Credit Karma needed a revised approach that would not only activate a new set of values but also re-activate and re-align their culture after a period of fast growth.

Here’s the 3 step process I led CEO Ken Lin and his team through that contributed to a double-digit increase in their employee engagement scores and values that are still in action, intact, and ingrained to this day.

Step 1: Define your change effort

When we think about the change efforts (including values activations) that we have all been a part of, they tend to fall on a spectrum, from push to pull (at you vs. with you), and from one size fits all to personalized (about anyone vs. about you). The choices we make when we communicate change can lead to different effects. The Gathering Effect model I created explains:

To determine where to start, first, clarify where to end -- the effect. What do we need from the people you’re trying to affect? What do you want to be different at the end? 

Credit Karma defined their values change effort as “engage”. More than anything, they wanted employees to be engaged around the new values, to be bought in so the values would stick for the long term.

The values activation would culminate in a gathering, a company all-hands.

Step 2: Diagnose your change effort

What quadrant are we actually in? If defining your gathering is the ideal state, diagnosis reveals the current state. 

What I observed from Credit Karma’s previous values activation:

“Top-down”, “Forced”. “Lacked involvement”. Surveys and interviews across the organization told the story of a ‘push’ change effort. A brief company meeting to share the first set of values put employees in a passive role, announced ‘at them’.

Both employees and leadership admitted their previous attempt lacked clarity: what values meant, why the initiative took place, and what it would mean for employees. 

Diagnosis:

Employees may have been informed, but not necessarily engaged. That’s because ~90% of the company meeting was compliance and information. This one-and-done, information-heavy approach is actually quite common. One reason is the assumption that employees are ready to embrace any new initiative simply because they work at the company. Yes, change requires the transfer of information, but getting employees to care and take ownership is also mandatory for engagement to stick. 

Why this matters: The way change is communicated determines people’s level of ownership and commitment.

Step 3: Adjusting your change effort

Activating an entirely new set of values 18 months after the first set of values was announced meant not only a change in values but a change in approach. We needed to ensure employees would be more accepting and less skeptical of the change.

Concerning attrition, engagement scores, and employee sentiment told leadership they not only wanted but needed more engagement, not simply compliance. 

A new approach looked to engage employees in the change so that it is done ‘with’ them instead of ‘at’ them.

Engagement comes from the conditions we create, not simply the content we share - or the values we choose.

Here’s how I helped CEO Ken and the team script their change effort for the engagement effect they wanted.

In partnership with executive and marketing leadership we centered our change effort around 3 sets of employees: the executive team, front-line managers, and employees, and instituted this 4-point plan:

1. Experiment and test with employees: use key groups to absorb and spread the change including an employee-led values committee of well-respected and influential employees.

2. Experiment and test with management behaviors: allow managers the opportunity to preview values + review actions and behaviors against the values

3. Executive presentation: equate values + culture with business success

4. Company all-hands: employees should know what the values are and what it means for them and the organization, values should be real and concrete, and values should resonate with old and new employees

Change efforts (and our gatherings that spark the change) fail or succeed not because of the content we share, but because of the conditions we create. Here’s how we created the 5 conditions for engagement with each employee group.

See and recognize your audience

At the very first meeting of the (volunteer-based) values committee, a group of ~18 cross-functional employees heard a summary of the data making the case for new company values: dozens of employee interviews, business metrics, and executive testimonials raised the stakes of not only the meeting but the change effort. Each committee member was pulled into helping not out of duty, but out of desire - personally invited by the executive team. Each took a turn to share why they said ‘yes’ to the committee and even invited a co-worker to join them, doubling their people power and proudly voicing their personal interest and investment in the project.

Instead of top-down change led by leadership only (push), pull subtly invites other employees to model the behavior you want. It signals change is safe and rewarding when change comes from people “just like you” and from a similar group and status. 

Make it just for them

The new values were introduced not simply via words (or values that other companies may also have), but through real, concrete, examples, and stories. This served to personalize the values and provide proof points that this revised set of values were ones that would stick.

The company all-hands included several examples connecting the values to the Credit Karma business, mission, and strategy, and a rubric for how to use the values to make specific decisions. A personalized video from Organizational Psychologist, Wharton Professor, and Best-Selling Author Adam Grant backed up CEO Ken Lin’s words with data from peer-reviewed studies on the importance of strong values and in particular, their values of helpfulness and empathy.

Give the audience ownership

People want to be needed and valued. Change that is leadership’s alone often stays that way.

The values committee was given a clear, participatory ask, and a unique role: to make the values real, reinforced, clear, and creative. They chose their own 4 projects (a leadership guide, interview guide, values decision matrix, and peer recognition program) that culminated in a presentation to their fellow employees at the company all-hands.

Over the course of project creation, there were several opportunities for employees to provide feedback on the values projects and the values themselves. The committee hosted an open house to gather feedback on their projects which served to pull more employees into the change so that when new values were introduced they were not surprised. People Managers were invited to several pre-launch sessions to preview the values, share their perspectives, see what would be required of them, and most of all, become more comfortable with the change.

Executive leadership was also given a clear role - owners of this change.

Connect to a universal concept

The change was introduced as not about the tool (values), but about the outcome (clarity). When employees ask why the organization does something one way, values tell employees exactly why. A need for clarity was a concept many if not all, employees in a rapidly growing organization understood and could not their heads about. Clarity was created at the all-hands via examples of business decisions that showed instead of told the company culture and founding stories of the values that shaped CEO Ken Lin as a leader.

Allow agency and choice

Pull doesn’t mean every single employee gets a say on what the new values are. It’s not a democratic process, especially if your company is over Dunbar’s number (150).

What employees do want and need is a say in or choice in how the values are implemented, specifically the behaviors — and to feel that their help is needed to make the change stick.

Managers were given a chance to review current actions or behaviors against the values and weigh in on what could get in the way of the values being successful. Instead of asking employees to adopt all values overnight, the all-hands closed with an invitation for them to focus on one value that resonates for them specifically and to let Ken know when the company wasn’t living up to the values. Employees who didn’t particularly want a new set of values were invited to still live the old values if they preferred.

“What kind of company do we want to be?”, asked CEO Ken at the end of the all-hands.

“If we rely on our culture and values to make decisions I am confident we can build a company that helps the next generation of families trying to provide a better life for their children. We can build a company that you and your family can be proud of”.

Top-down, leader-directed push change efforts rarely connect or motivate employees to take up change as their own. They remain words on a plaque or a website. This is one reason why so many companies seem to change their values as often as their snack food.

Instead of spending all our time on what the values will be, spend as much or more time on how you’ll bring that change to people. 

Our role is not simply to create the content but the conditions for the change we seek to stick and extend beyond us. The combination of choices we make has the ability to fuel motivation, draw people in, and pull on their desire to take up a change as their own.

Lindsey Caplan is a screenwriter turned organizational psychologist who creates experiences that boost motivation, engagement, and performance

Say hello@gatheringeffect.com