Values are the highest principles that reflect the business approach, the brand identity and the organizational communication skills of companies. These principles significantly affect companies and their relationships with both employees and customers and are critical to success.

Values are like basically the skeleton of an organization and critical in determining a company’s vision, mission and identity. The core values of a company not only guide decision-making and communication processes but also help organizations navigate successfully during difficult times.

Personal core values are the beliefs and principles that are formed in the family at an early age. In later ages, we forget that there are, in fact, things that underlie almost all the decisions we make in our lives. Companies are composed of people and like families, the core elements that make up companies are there from the beginning, but they need to be seen and understood by their employees. In fact, values are like precious stones. They are often deeply buried, waiting to be discovered.

That’s what we exactly did at Commencis to identify our values. Here’s an overview of our values and key highlights on how we created them.

Commencers are guided by five core values in the decisions and actions they take every day. Our values define how we do business, interact with each other and with our stakeholders – and they also underpin our company culture. Since values are so often deployed in our everyday lives, we were careful to make them memorable and catchy during the evaluation phase.

At Commencis, our values were shaped by what we have been already doing, not merely by what we would like to be. We also developed our values through the collaborative effort of Commencers. First, we interviewed our co-founders and gathered insights from our senior managers.

During our meetings with the management team, we asked them some questions that focused on discovering our values regarding different topics. These included our strengths and weaknesses, and key moments in the history of Commencis. As the next step, we analysed some specific situations in the company, such as the specifications we consider in the recruitment process and what our red lines are.

The next step comprised workshop processes. Here, we involved people from various departments and engaged in different exercises. First of all, we started with an ice-breaker exercise to determine our personal values and better understand what they represent. We examined some of the more interesting examples together. We then divided into groups and reflected on our strengths, weaknesses and the important moments we had experienced, and we conducted brainstorming exercises with sticky notes. Finally, we examined our own outputs from the session. Each group shared their values and the underlying reasons for them. The workshops ended with votings to determine the common core values.

When it comes to the question of how to keep these values alive in an organizational culture, the following can be the key points:

Values are solid pillars that we can hold to in critical decision moments, “wherever the wind blows”. In the case of a storm, correct value-based decisions can keep the company ship afloat. The core values act as filters for us when evaluating business decisions.

Values guide us on how we should communicate with each other internally as well as with our clients or other stakeholders through different channels to avoid confusion.

It is important that core values are shared with candidates during interviews and with newbies at onboarding period. Recruiting people who can embrace your values is significant for creating a strong community and strengthen the foundations of your company.

The feedback we receive from our team or colleagues is shaped within the framework of our core values and becomes a tool that both employees and employers will benefit from for better performance.

Bearing these critical points in mind, we’ve already taken some actions to integrate our values into our daily life at Commencis. First, we displayed our values prominently around our workplaces. In addition to this, we made some branded materials such as “values cards” to boost motivation and help Commencers embrace our values in their daily lives.

Here are some of the other actions we’ve taken to bring our values to life throughout our organization:

• We launched a video introducing our values to be displayed in our offices.
  
• We embraced the climate change issue in 2020 and started implementing actions in the office for taking ownership.
  
• We like having fun together as one community and we gather for workshops, online sessions, social-club activities, happy hours, New Year parties, etc.
  
• We organize Commencer Sessions where Commencers share their experiences and successful projects while striving to be the best.
  
• We integrated our values into HR interview e-mails and the onboarding process to inform potential and new Commencers about our company and culture.
  

Values are visualized in different ways, but the process starts with colours and shapes, and always incorporates the brand personality.

Understanding the psychology of colours is critical here. Our Brand & Communication Design Lead shares her opinion on the importance of colour theory while building the brand identity. She maintains that colour can significantly influence team perception and behaviour. The colour palette was selected to reflect our brand personality, and a continued focus on colour psychology enhances the visualization of these values:

Graphical shapes are also carefully selected to maintain a harmonious balance with the colours.

This graphical approach allows a sense of unity and harmony to be conveyed in an accessible, intuitive way.