Evolving Learnerbly's Values: The Process

 At Learnerbly, we evolved our values (and made sure they would actually make sense).

🤔 A reminder: what are values?

Role expectations are what you do.

Values are how you do it.

We evolved our values for scale, so that:

• everyone has clarity over what we value and what it means in practice, aka how we expect each other to behave at work
• our team can thrive, our business can grow, and our people can belong

🍂 Our old values

Lovely but not clear, actionable or scalable. Something needed to evolve for our fast-growing 70-ish team to thrive, our business to grow, and our people to belong.

🔬 The process: Retro-engineering

To embed existing values, we build rituals that encourage specific behaviours. But to elevate existing values... we retro-engineer!

📊 Gathering data

Classic bottom-up, we gathered info with an everyone survey, everyone workshops and leadership interviews. With a 90+% participation rate because we all care like that.

We defined what behaviours we do like, do want, and don't want: they emerged from the data analytics, a whole hub-worth (yes, we've open-sourced that baby!). Then, we unearthed underlying values (with shovels, brushes and sieves).

💥 Focus on impact

To do that, we took our set of behaviours and linked them to the impact they have when they're actually lived. For example, if "we share and receive candid feedback", we'll learn and we'll grow. It's not always that clear a line but crossover is totally normal.

We turned that into a visual map - partly because by that point we had a lot of data to work with so that's more digest, and partly because it's pretty. That helped us sense the behaviours our values would enable and encourage.

FYI, superpower includes trust, safety, inclusion, belonging, and diversity.

💅 Finishing touches

Next steps included a finalisation workshop with the leadership team, feedback from the project group and in-depth chats with our local wordsmiths.

And voila, evolved values were born.

But not just. With each value comes a 1-word associated behaviour and 3 descriptors of what great looks like in action. So they're clear, actionable, and scalable.

🍑 The shape of a value

So they can be mapped against actions, our values are in verb form and so are the behaviours. For example, for our value Always Grow, the behaviours are 'Learn' and 'Improve', and the descriptors are:

• We are curious and continuously take ourselves out of our comfort zone to spark new ways to develop ourselves, and each other.
• We humbly respond to feedback and proactively share advice with others to reveal new insights and accelerate growth.
• We proactively share what we learn and seek the contrary opinion in the room to diversify perspectives.

So they're not an acronym. But they're genuine, representative, and they are clear, actionable and scalable. And if you ask me (let's pretend you did) that's pretty cool.

📹 Here's the launch video of our evolved values!

🚀 Up next: Launching, launching, launching (it's not just a video 😉), and embedding them across the employee experience, processes, and how we build a high-performance culture!