Company Values are Rubbish
James Bream, Katoni Engineering
I’m hoping that I look credible. Some of you might think I look incredible, and thanks for that. There is a disclaimer on my first slide and I’ll start it after I want to get going because that gives me an extra couple of seconds. So it just basically says that I’m not really credible at all. Anything here is an advice and that I’m making all of this up as I go along. But the good news is Wendy’s told me that all of you lot are as well. So I’m in a safe space.
So what I’m going to tell you is that you’ve all been cheated, been cheated for a long while by probably a corporate comms team who have been getting you to work on values. Now, I think that you’ve just kind of fallen in that space. You might be in a relationship that feels like that, a job even, or when Boris locked you down, you kind of felt like that too. So it happens. But these comms guys who come in charge you a fortune, think about the values of the person that’s sitting next to you, swap to them, and will it really make a difference to your business? You can get by on a website without values. You don’t need workwear. You don’t need a tone of voice without the values, and you certainly don’t need underwear.
Now, the slides, what Wendy didn’t say was that I didn’t want to use slides. So you can read them, but there bear no resemblance to what I’m going to say. They’re just a bunch of words really. So you’ve been cheated.
Now, I always wanted to run a business. I wanted to run it a bit differently, but sometimes running things and doing things differently does make you look like a bit of a dick. And I know that I can only look like a dick now for another three minutes. But when you’re kind of being provocative, and you’ll see some of the values here, some of those are your company’s values. I’m really sorry about that, but you won’t remember any of these. And it’s because values aren’t culture. Culture is lived. It’s not in a poster. It’s probably a dog-eared poster by now, and it’s probably on circles in a wall, which are one blue, one red, one green, and one yellow. And if that’s you guys, I’m really sorry.
But I suppose what I’m here to say is that I don’t believe in values because you can’t really measure them. As an economist, you kind of want to measure everything. And the values that are often put up on the, words on the wall here are really kind of just human decency. Do we need to tell people to care or be committed? Like that’s just turning up to work and being a person really. So I think it should be more than that.
Now, the other thing is, they don’t demonstrate difference, they don’t help you sell. So what do they really do? The best one I’ve seen, and I think it might have passed, but it’s passion. Now, I thought about sitting down in a review and thinking about passion and talking to a member of staff about it. I don’t think it would be received that well. So I’m going to set you a challenge. Go home at night, if you’ve got a partner, and ask them to be more passionate in the bedroom and see what the result is. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to have the result of giving you more passion.
So we’ve gone through human decency. Collaboration was up there, a great one. Basically, everybody’s waiting for somebody to fall over, not collaborate, because collaborating is win-win. In the workplace, generally you’re trying to climb the ladder. So that doesn’t happen, and neither does doing the right thing because doing the right thing is only relatable to who you are. The right thing to somebody else is a totally different thing. But you’re HR people, so you are my people, you’re my audience. And so you’ll understand this. It isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. So forget these meek and useless slogans. Nobody remembers them. My challenge to you is grab the shiny posters or the dog-eared ones in many of your cases and challenge yourself.
Now we have something called the Katoni Way, which actually looks at a whole bunch of things from customer service, what we are as an employer, what we are as an employee, and it actually takes you through all the little things that you can do to actually live a culture. It’s to live and breathe in of our social activities, our procedures, the things we do. That is the thing that helps us help ourselves to be better employees. And this isn’t about being nice to each other. This is about driving performance, making money, and making money for yourself. But also, it captures everything that you need to do to actually enjoy each other’s company and be social too.
So hopefully after this, you’ll go back to your corporate comms team. Maybe because you’re in HR positions, you can just fire them anyway, you know there are ways, and you can get on with running a more successful business without a bunch of shit on your walls. Thank you very much. And Katoni liked to finish ahead of time and budget and all that stuff, so.
Watch the video of James delivering his session over on Vimeo >>> DisruptHR Aberdeen 2.0 – April 24 2025 on Vimeo
