At the end of last year our CEO set us a task to re-define our core values. To research, evaluate and make recommendations about what our core value should be in 2021 and beyond. We believed this was something which should be built from the inside out, rather than employing an agency to take a helicopter view and make external recommendations.
Whilst personally, we had never done anything like this before, we both had lots of ideas about what Indesser stood for and we were keen to create something that did this justice.
To kick things off, we needed to understand why we need core values
Core values shape the vision and culture of an organisation to define our company identity. They are a set of principles that inform our decision-making processes, help to determine areas of focus and help educate existing clients, the wider public sector and potential employees what Indesser stands for.
Most importantly, defining a new set of core values would help ensure we are all working towards the same goals, as our core values would support Indesser's vision and shape its culture.
Researching our current values
We needed to gather key information about our current values:
- What did Indesser’s current values look like?
- What values do our key stakeholders live by?
- What did we as individuals think makes Indesser special?
- Everything we do at Indesser is powered by the work of the people behind the scenes at TDX Group. So what were their values and how did they translate to how we support our clients at Indesser?
- Finally, as part of the Equifax group, we looked at the core values of our parent company and how other organisations defined themselves through core values
Some common themes emerged around working together, transparency and making things better - each with enough supporting explanations that sufficiently covered what we wanted to say but left room for interpretation.
Stakeholder approval process
Perhaps, the most challenging part of the process was stakeholder approval. From our Director of Consumer Affairs, Richard Haymes to the Indesser Chair, Andy Briscoe. Whilst this did take a number of iterations, capturing the thoughts across the Indesser team helped us lock in the most important information and prepare a final draft to run through with our CEO.
We took away some great pointers and followed up with a run through with the full Indesser team. Feedback following this was really encouraging again and really helped us to understand some common misinterpretations and adapt accordingly.
The last piece of the jigsaw was the presentation to the Board. Here we obtained that important final seal of approval along with some important feedback on embedding these values. In addition, the exposure to the group was a really positive experience for our personal development.
Our new values
The end result was a final set of values which faced a great level of scrutiny from the whole Indesser team. So we were confident we’d achieved our goal of producing a meaningful but manageable set of values. The graphic below offers an overview of the core values we decided upon.
You can find out more detail about these on our new Core Values page - click here for more information.
What we learned during this process
- Keeping stakeholders engaged throughout means you gain a range of important viewpoints and remain focussed on an outcome that users are bought in to.
- It’s definitely easier to push your boundaries if you are partaking in something you really care about
We are so excited to watch these values become embedded internally into team awards and performance reviews and see them be published on the Indesser website for all to see
In the words of the Dalai Lama “Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values”.
Find out more about our core values