This article originally appears in the November 2021 issue of Security Business magazine. When sharing, don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter.
With a new CEO in place at PSA, our leadership team spent the summer dedicated to building our five-year strategic plan. Part of strategic planning often includes reassessing an organization’s mission, vision and core values. For PSA, we did not previously have core values and were ready for an update of our mission and vision as well.
While we used an excellent moderator for our strategic sessions, Joel Harris with Navigate Consulting, I was able to personally lead the mission, vision and values exercises.
Let’s talk about core values. Why are they important? Core values should be the guiding principles for employees at an organization. Employees should embody these qualities and hiring managers should ensure a potential employee aligns with them before making an offer.
Likewise, core values let the customer base know what to expect when doing business with an organization. Simply put, our core values show how we will conduct ourselves professionally and are a key element that defines PSA’s culture going forward.
Inside PSA’s Core Value Creation Exercise
How did we go about creating PSA’s new core values? All it took was two hours, 10 stacks of post-it notes and PSA’s leadership team. I asked everyone to come prepared for constructive confrontation and not to be afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
First, I put the definition of core values on a screen and gave everyone 10 minutes to come up with as many principles that they felt express what PSA is all about or who we would like to be in the future. Each value was written on a separate post-it note and stuck to the wall in the room.
Next, the real fun began. I grouped together the values that were similar, eliminated any redundancies and then we began to talk through the themes. We quickly learned that we were mostly on the same page with our expectations and understandings of who PSA should be.
Though we had plenty of back and forth about how to express each sentiment in the best way and, ultimately, which values made the final cut.
An organization should not have too many core values. They need to be easy for employees to remember so three to five is a good number to strive for; therefore, the hardest part of the whole exercise can be refining the list and settling on the most important values.
We settled on the following core values and wrote descriptions for each to express exactly what they mean for PSA:
- Passion: We are passionate about our work and have fun doing it!
- Integrity: We are honest and trustworthy.
- Boldness: We are forward thinking and innovative. We aren’t afraid to take risks or have a different opinion.
- Service: We live and breathe exceptional customer service.
The Next Steps
The next step for PSA was to unveil these core values to our board of directors and employees. We want to ensure we are constantly reminding our team of these principles so we will be placing them on signage around the office, buying each employee branded swag with the values listed on it and regularly bringing them up in our all-hands meetings.
We have other plans in the works for our core values as well, such as employee awards (where we recognize someone who goes above and beyond to exemplify each of the values), external branding campaigns, adding them to job descriptions, and more.
The approach PSA took is by no means the only way to develop new core values or revamp old ones. Your organization can get employees involved by having a contest for team members to submit ideas or even assign a committee of employees from all departments and levels within the organization.
No matter how you define them, just take the time to do so – your company culture will greatly benefit from it.
Candice Aragon is the VP of Marketing and Events for PSA Security Network. Request more info about PSA at www.securityinfowatch.com/10214742.
