What an iGaming scale up can teach you about articulating company values
Company values is one of those topics that can get wry smiles when you talk about it.
Whether they’re newly introduced to long-standing employees, written on the wall in vinyl or brought up at interviews with applicants.
In discussions about values, culture, and vision, it’s common for buzzwords and vague language to fill the air, just as meaning leaves via the fire exit.
This isn’t due to the fluffiness of HR. Though I’ll admit to sporting an admirable beard of late. It’s more about these aspects of a company living in the subconscious minds of our employees.
It’s likely they’re not understood by senior management or live on the periphery of how a company’s C-suite believes they operate.
The true values of a company are best observed through the actions and behaviours of its people. Every single one of them. From new hires to the aforementioned leadership team.
When someone new joins a company, they’re particularly attuned to the culture on show.
They actively seek out clues by observing how employees interact, share information, and exchange ideas.
The culture becomes apparent in how leaders communicate, delegate tasks, provide feedback and recognition, and handle obstacles, challenges, and conflicts.
A new employee's subconscious mind is busy from the moment they enter the new environment, analysing micro-behaviours and determining the appropriate approach to take in different situations.
The human mind
This process of observation, internalisation, and assimilation is innate to human nature. We all do it, all of the time.
But starting a new job, in a new environment, in a new team, with new surroundings and new ways of doing things, we’re on hyper alert in order to make the transition easier.
This is the power of values and culture.
People assimilate into them organically to belong, and they stick around in the company’s DNA after people leave.
This is why you should make an effort to articulate these values and nudge the culture in the direction that will truly help your business achieve its goals.
Don’t let this process remain fully in the subconscious however, as you’ll risk losing control over where your people are taking the company.
We observe, learn, and imitate in order to fit in and belong.
To truly align your company values to the existing behaviours of the group should take you on a journey of self discovery. They shouldn’t just be based on how you’d like to behave. But also how you do already.
It’s a process of discovering and uncovering them rather than creating something completely new.
It involves attempting to articulate the guiding principles of behaviour that are already being shown and promoted, while aligning them to the company’s mission
Imagine you’re a new hire and walk into the office on day one. On the wall is the word ‘Professionalism’. Just as you read it, you spot an employee review taking place in a glass office. The Manager swears at their subordinate, who bursts into tears as awkwardness fills the room.
Your mind would certainly notice the value written for everyone to see. But only as an abstract example of what’s not happening. And this highlights the importance of matching your company values to your existing environment.
And the wry smiles from the room when you mention company values? They’re no doubt due, in part, to the disparity at many companies between the ideal and the reality.
What can you learn from a scale up?
Having started at WKND in November 2022 and being a new starter myself, I was in a great position to start understanding what makes WKND unique.
And seeing as it was my job to articulate it, what better time to do so?
I held a number of intro meetings with managers, senior leadership, the CEO and a number of employees.
Being a company of 50-60 people, I started this process the old fashioned way, in person, via video calls, face to face, but always in conversation.
Don’t worry, the surveys came later.
But first, I wanted to get to know the minds behind WKND and the vision that drives us. So I sat down with Jennie, our CEO, and asked a couple of challenging questions.
Questions like:
How do we want to differ from competitors?
What do we like and dislike about the industry?
What do our players like about our products?
What are our long-term goals?
What are our competitors doing better than us?
How do we envision the future of our industry?
And how do we want to position ourselves in that future?
How do we want to inspire and engage our employees through our vision statement?
What behaviours do we want to see more of from employees?
As you can see, these aren’t ‘fluffy’ questions about feelings and opinions.
They’re business questions.
In fact, if you’re a CEO or manager, these are essential questions to ask yourself now and again.
Do so and you’ll make sure your work‘s aligned with what your business is trying to do, and the problems you’re trying to solve for your clients.
When I joined WKND, a scale up business competing in a maturing and fast-changing industry, a lot of our challenges were clear.
We needed to be unique.
We needed to be quick on our feet.
A benefit of working in a startup is that there’s no preconceived notion to fall back on. There’s no “we’ve always done it this way” mindset. Because values, culture and visions are being defined and redefined every day.
They’re defined from above, but redefined every time a new employee joins the fold with new ideas, new backgrounds and new methods.
I knew when I joined this was an advantage I wanted to capitalise on. We want our products to leave an impression. Every one we produce.
Each iGaming site we create needs to contribute something new and exciting to our industry. And above all else, the player’s positively thrilling experience always comes first.
Humans + AI =
After Jennie felt I had the gist of how WKND worked and what we valued, we moved on to phase 2: The Surveys.
How would you describe WKND in 3 words?
What work that you do is consistent with the culture, and what isn’t?
What attracted you to WKND and why do you stay?
What makes WKND different?
What should we change or improve?
What became clear from the results was there was great employee engagement at WKND.
In fact an overwhelming majority (82%) felt they contribute to our culture.
Most of the phrases used to describe WKND culture were already in tune with what we’re trying to do differently as a business.
So we kept the questions vague and let them do the thinking.
Naturally, given the wide parameters, the resulting information was wide and diverse. There were long lists of words and terms from all corners that defined WKND.
And so to harness this information we utilised AI. We took the raw data and analysed it to summarise, condense and identify key themes and phrases from the list our employees provided.
Condensing the essence of what the CEO’s vision of the company is with what employees believe it is (and should be) isn’t easy work. But using AI really helped to align every sentiment into a defined set of values.
The power of presentation
So, you’ve got your values, in whichever direction they’ve taken so far, you’ve done your research. They represent who you are, who you want to be and everyone’s on board, including the new robot overlord sitting in the corner office.
How do you present your new fancy principles?
You’ll have seen one-word values bandied around like Innovation, Teamwork, and Determination. Words that mean everything and nothing at the same time.
You’ve seen them paraded around on social media like they’re going to solve a company’s damaging retention woes.
You’ve seen them announced in company-wide emails and written on office walls.
For yours not to go the same way and fall flat on their face, you must communicate them as effectively as the research you took to begin with.
Your people need to understand why you’ve arrived at these values. That they’re not a plaster taping up serious wounds in the business and actually mean something. Something they’ve defined from the existing fabric of the business.
You need to present your new values as existing values. Ones that have been in place for a long time, but never vocalised.
The power of doing this is that you’ll be communicating with the subconscious part of your peoples’ brains. The part that understands emotions, not language.
If you communicate directly with the Limbic system, the thing that drives human behaviour, your values will rise beyond a box ticking exercise and become something which makes sense for every participant.
Beyond this, my advice would be to describe your values in a way that goes beyond single-word verbs and uses phrases that promote meaningful and specific behaviours.
Spell it out for your people.
At WKND, we chose “Action Phrases”.
What we ended up with was the following, action phrases and a short description of each:
Adapt quickly - be agile.
We're quick on our feet. We adapt. We’re quick thinking and hard working. We’re open-minded and embrace unpredictability.
Stay relentless. Never give up.
We're ambitious and commit to overcome challenges and setbacks in pursuit of our goals. We strive for excellence through humility, perseverance and continuous improvement.
Nurture your talents.
We believe in creating a supportive and nurturing work environment where everyone is valued, respected, and encouraged to grow. In return we are expected to be accountable for our work and champion our own development through autonomy and honesty.
Go where others don’t dare.
We seize opportunities, shake things up and try new things. We share a growth mindset and strive to create experiences worth talking about. We’re creative, bold and fearless.
Unleash the power of play.
Having fun leads to better experiences for players and more reward for our teams. We can be ourselves and reach our full potential while contributing to something great, together.
Using this for your own Values mission
There are some downsides to using action phrases in your values.
Firstly, it’s a bit more challenging to memorise them all.
If you really want to ingrain your values in the minds of the people you employ, it’s best to choose things they can learn off by heart and know inside out. How else will they really know whether they’re living them if they don’t know them?
Because no one’s going to check the company intranet to find out.
Even then, memorising them doesn’t mean they’ll be understood more clearly or put into action everyday. Whether that’s something you prioritise is your own call.
For us at WKND, it’s enough for an employee to remember how a value made them feel. How they felt when they read it, and when they identified themselves with it.
We’re quite happy with where this journey has lead us.
Through this process we’ve also clarified our vision and mission, and are in the process of working on clear company-wide goals.
What we found is that when your WHY is clear, the rest is easier to fall into place.
You can find out more about our values, and appreciate the awesome work our design team did to make them standout and memorable via the link below.
But to summarise for your own values mission:
Speak to your people. Person to person
Ask tough questions. About the challenges and threats to the business
Understand what your people value. Use anonymous surveys
Use AI. Save yourself excel sheet drama
Decide how you want to present your values. Action statements, phrases or singular words (try not to do this)
Make sure they’re understood. Spell them out and elaborate.
Include them in your employee’s daily work lives. Merch, peer to peer recognition, leadership development, performance management and refer back to them in tough decisions.
Hopefully you got some value of your own from this article and have a rewarding experience as we did in articulating our values.