🖤 Open Works #026 How To Co-Create Values So They Don't End Up As Just "Words On A Wall"

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

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🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

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🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve This

🏃 TL;DR:

1. Involve the whole org—values only stick when people co-create them.

2. Design for action—define the behaviours behind the values.

3. 10:90 rule of Design : Operationalising. The design part is only the tip of the iceberg.

🔥 The Problem

We’ve all seen company values that sound great but don’t mean anything in practice. Cough Enron, Cough. "Integrity." "Respect." "Communication." Cool… but what does that actually mean?

The goal is to design a set of values that actually shape how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and how leaders lead.

This is where most companies go wrong. They:

❌ Write them in a vacuum. Leadership picks words that sound nice.
❌ Make them generic. They don’t reflect how work actually happens.
❌ Never operationalise them. No link to tangibles in hiring, feedback, or promotions etc.

If your values don’t show up in daily decisions, they are pointless.

So how do you make them real? Here’s how we run this project.

🚀 Open Org’s 7-Step Approach To Values Design

💡 Goal: A co-created set of values and behaviours that shape decision-making, meetings, personal development, hiring, and more.

📅 Timeline: ~4 weeks

1. Org-Wide Comms: Start With Why

🔹 Message: Why we’re doing this, why now, and how we’ll avoid this being “words on a wall.”
🔹 Slack Comms Example Template

2. Concise, Powerful Survey

One of the pitfalls is to try and do a war and peace survey with 10s of questions. You don’t need to. Keep it simple and ask good questions.

🔹 Focus Areas:
✅ What behaviours help us do our best work?
✅ What’s holding us back?
✅ What should we protect as we scale?

🔹 Survey Setup: Typeform, Slack, and email comms.
🔹 Example Questions: 

3. Data Aggregation & Synthesis

🔹 Translate qualitative and quantitative data into a clear summary.
🔹 Output: Notion page or deck with key themes and patterns.

💡Pro Tip: GPT is excellent at summarising free text responses into themes, so use a custom GPT to accelerate your work here.

// Prompt for config

"You are an experienced people experience designer and data nerd who provides accurate, non-biased interpretation of survey data free text responses into key themes, insights and stories. You are especially gifted at pattern recognition and sentiment analysis and when i provide you with a .csv of survey data you create a notion page with charts summarising the data into 4-7 candidate core values with suggested behaviour statements in "Do's and Don't' format."

4. Playback To The Org

🔹 Share the findings from the survey with whole org (notion page or pack and use as a foundation to invite volunteers to help sense-make and refine in the next step.

5. Facilitated Workshops (Miro or In-Person)

We are aiming for somewhere around 15%-20% representation of the company in these. So if you are 100 people, aim for 15-20 from a mix of tenure, function and seniority.

You can run them 100% async and meeting-less or facilitated over Miro/Figma.

🔹 Small group sessions (<10-person workshops)
🔹 Format:
✅ Silent sorting: Identify key themes.
✅ Dot voting: Prioritise.
✅ Drafting: Define draft values & behaviours from
✅ Making it actionable: “Do’s & Don’ts” for each value.

🔹 Example Output:
💡 Value: “Challenge Directly, Care Deeply”
✅ Do: Give real-time feedback with good intent.
❌ Don’t: Store up feedback for annual reviews.

6. Publish Version 1 & Gather Feedback

🔹 Draft and share the first version.
🔹 Format: Short, punchy statements with behaviour examples.
🔹 Engage leaders to invite feedback from their teams.

We should be aiming for something like this:

7. Operationalise & Embed

🔹 Share public roadmap on how values will be embedded and made real.

🚀 Example People Roadmap: Operationalising Core Values

📌 Recruitment & Hiring

✅ 📋 Values-Based Hiring Scorecard – Ensures interviewers assess candidates on alignment with company values, leading to better culture fit and lower attrition.
✅ 💬 Structured Interview Question Bank – Standardised, values-driven behavioural interview questions to reduce bias and improve hiring consistency.
✅ 🎯 Hiring Manager Training on Values Alignment – Enables hiring managers to identify, attract, and assess candidates who align with company values.
✅ 👥 Candidate Experience Guide – Ensures candidates experience company values from first touchpoint, improving employer brand and offer acceptance rates.

📈 Performance & Retention

✅ 📊 Values-Embedded Performance Review Templates – Employees are evaluated not just on outcomes, but on how they achieve results in alignment with values.
✅ 🚀 Promotion & Career Progression Criteria – Clearly defines how demonstrating core values impacts advancement opportunities.
✅ 🏆 Employee Recognition & Reward Program – Celebrates employees who consistently demonstrate company values, increasing engagement.
✅ 📖 Manager Playbook for Coaching & Feedback – Guides managers on how to reinforce values in everyday coaching and performance conversations.

🎓 Leadership & Development

✅ 📢 Manager & Leadership Training on Living the Values – Equips leaders with tools to model and reinforce values in their teams.
✅ 🧭 Values-Driven Decision-Making Framework – Helps teams navigate tough decisions by referencing core values as a guiding principle.
✅ 🆕 Onboarding Program Reinforcing Core Values – Ensures new hires understand and integrate values into their daily work from day one.

🏢 Culture & Employee Engagement

✅ 📊 Quarterly Values Pulse Survey – Measures how well values are understood and lived across the organisation.
✅ 🎙️ All-Hands & Town Hall Integration – Leadership ties business updates to core values, reinforcing their importance.
✅ 📢 Internal Communications & Values Messaging – Regular storytelling around values in action (e.g., newsletters, Slack channels).

📌 Next Steps

📌 Run a values survey – simple but powerful starting point.
📌 Plan small-group workshops – sense-making, not brainstorming. Target 20% representation.
📌 Build values into systems – decision-making, hiring, and feedback loops.

Values aren’t real until they shape decisions. Make sure they do.

👉️ If you’d like some help on your values project, hit reply–we’d be happy to soundboard for you.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Runa values (‘do’s and don’ts’ format)

📗 Learnerbly Values Evolution (open source project)

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