How can values strengthen your organization?

Brenda Perez: Hi, I’m Brenda Perez. I’m an account manager at Big Duck. I’m a worker-owner and I also serve as a board secretary for our co-op, Big Duck. Before Big Duck, I worked in the nonprofit field doing community engagement, community organizing, and various sort of like issues like transportation and immigrant rights and labor. At Big Duck, I really love my position because it lets me enjoy my diversity of issues that are so worthwhile and I get to work with clients who are enacting this work in various communities. So excited to share with y’all today a little bit about our values process. I’ll pass it over to Claire.

Claire Taylor Hansen: Hi, I’m Claire Taylor Hansen I use she/her pronouns and I am a co-director at Big Duck. I also wear the hat of worker-owner and board member––proud to be serving on the board at the moment––and I’m also a graphic designer on our team. So, I wear many hats at Big Duck. I’ve been at Big Duck for eight years and I have the privilege of crafting nonprofit brands, mostly focusing on the visual side for our clients and partners. And I also collaborated with our team on crafting the latest version of our value statements after we converted to becoming a worker-owned co-op. And, like Brenda, I’m excited to kind of show behind the curtain and talk about how we went about that process and talk about how other organizations might consider embarking on a similar journey.

Brenda Perez: Great. So today we will explore how crafting value statements can build your identity and strengthen your organization. Whether that is a business, nonprofit, or a co-op. Values can be used internally and externally to define who you are and clarify what you stand for and how you do it. So, like Claire said, in 2023, Big Duck facilitated the development of its own values as a co-op, adapting our creative process that we use for our clients.

Claire Taylor Hansen: And when we do work with clients, we partner with organizations of all sizes to help them articulate their values. And so when it was time for us to craft our own, we were really excited and felt equipped to do it on our own. And we’re gonna reflect back on that process and share why it reminded us once again of why values are so useful. And we’re gonna share some key things to keep in mind that we worked on and also for you to keep in mind as you potentially craft your own.

Brenda Perez: Claire, why was it a right moment for Big Duck, for us, to update our values and when should any org consider taking this on?

Claire Taylor Hansen: For us, we just had a major pivotal life moment in our history as an organization. We were founded by a wonderful person named Sarah Durham who had led the organization and shaped the organization for 25 years. And we had just converted: very exciting moment, to becoming a worker-owned cooperative. And so we were really taking on a new phase of life and we had a new team and we were really thinking about, “Well who are we in this next chapter of our organization? And how do we craft some values that are reflective of this new entity that we have created?” So for other organizations, if you are at a similar lifecycle moment, it doesn’t have to be quite so huge, but any time that you have shifted, where you have new leadership, you’ve just gone through a strategic plan, anything where you’re looking and you’re saying, “Okay, we’re entering a new chapter of our organization and this could be a great moment to have some more guiding communications tools and some kind of key foundational elements to unify who we are.” So Brenda, how did we make values that reflected our team and organization and how can others do the same?

Brenda Perez: Yeah, so I think at that point I had been a staff member and worker-owner at Big Duck for about maybe like a year, and a year and a half. We did a great job of, like, updating everybody that this was like a process that was going to be happening. It had, like, a general timeline, obviously with a little asterisk because, you know, timelines were made to be shifted. There was like engagement points that were mapped out with the staff, with worker-owners, and with the board. And I think for nonprofits or other types of organizations, it’s just good to take a map and assessment of who cares about you and your mission. And how do you want to bring them along, right? So think about your staff, your board, even external audiences, if you have members, if you work in a coalition, who are your coalition partners that you want to involve, and at what points? For me as an experience as a worker-owner in that moment, it was like a fun team-bonding experience that we collaborated on and there was a good flow of back-and-forth and obviously, that was made because we had the availability and resources on hand for that. So, it’s something that can definitely be adjusted to whatever types of resources your organization has. Whether you do, like, an in-person workshop moment, or you can do like a survey assessment, or go through department meetings. I think it was just a really important part is to just, you know, take a pause and to workshop and brainstorm with folks as you move along.

Brenda Perez: A couple of other things that I think really helpful is just having a couple feedback moments. Have a couple of places where you know that things may shift, depending on what you hear. Just be ready for that. So plan for feedback, don’t be surprised by it. I think feedback is a, it’s a really strong way that people show commitment. When people give feedback is because they care. So we want to encourage it and plan for it. When we work with our clients on the values process, as my role as an account manager, you know, I do kind of like the project management and the timelining and we always think if it’s possible, “What are the moments that we can survey staff? What are the moments that we can send out a survey or conversations with external stakeholders? What are the moments of input that fit within the resources that this organization has?” So those are some of the ways that we did it. What would you add, Claire, because I know you had a different experience than I did? I was kind of like a receiver here, but you were one of the facilitators. How was it from your angle?

Claire Taylor Hansen: I agree with everything you said. I think also just keeping in mind it can be a really fun team-building experience for folks. There’s a lot of fun workshops, exercises, activities that can be done. It can be a great thing for a staff retreat or an annual meeting. People can get up and kind of get creative. There’s lots of exercises online you can find to kind of help brainstorm. And then also, it’s so important to be transparent with the process. It’s supposed to really reflect the team. And so, of course, it’s impossible to write things as a committee, but having authentic input is possible and valuable and will result in an outcome that’s reflective of the team. So things like the survey Brenda mentioned, sharing back the results to the team and making shifts and changes to reflect the feedback, genuinely and authentically, so that they really do end up reflecting the group.

Brenda Perez: And I agree, I think that it’s these engagement points that really kind of create ownership of our values and we’re gonna just share a little bit later about how do you use this, but you are front-loading the time of co-creation but then it really makes it stick versus something that was just handed to you. So I always encourage to make sure to plan for input and feedback moments from our team there.

Claire Taylor Hansen: Absolutely. So, Brenda, we are a bit of a unique entity because we are a cooperative. How did we make sure that our values were reflective of our governance? But for other organizations that may not be a co-op, how do you just keep in mind internal culture or just different dynamics about structure?

Brenda Perez: Yeah, we’re super special because we’re a co-op. Actually there’s lots of coops all over the United States, so definitely look into them. But yeah, we are also special. Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting question. The answer I feel is gonna look a little bit different for all organizations, right? I feel like the nonprofits that I’ve come across, there’s always a desire to work with stakeholders, work with people who are most impacted, work with the long-term community members who have been devoted to these issues. And then we have resources, that are always limited. So like how do we create a process that addresses all of this and makes space for all of these? If there was like a really simple answer, I would’ve shared it by now. The first step is always share who you are, who has been involved, who has given time to your organization. Whether that’s former staff members who were with you for a month or 10 years, to you know, people who are on staff now, to like if you are a service organization to the people who are receiving your services. Make space for them to have a moment of input. Whether that’s through a formal process like a survey survey or through information gathering from your staff.

Brenda Perez: It looks all sorts of different ways, but having that assessment of who you are, who are your partners, who are the people who have devoted time to advance your mission, and then look at your timeline and see how you can involve them. There’s power dynamics in every organization. There’s power dynamics in the grocery store, there’s power dynamics in our nonprofits, it’s everywhere, right? So have an honest assessment of that too. If your leadership is on a learning curve of how to adjust that, that maybe lean into it a little bit more of like, “How are we gonna make sure this process has a little bit more time to advance and get input from our stakeholders?” It’s a challenge, but I think asking yourself those questions and giving your organization time and space to answer them is the first step.

Brenda Perez: I think for us too, one of the ways that it made it easy, or easier, to be like, “Yeah, this should be a worker-owner process that should involve staff,” is leaning a little bit into one of the principles for co-ops, which is democratic member control. And so there’s seven principles. I encourage anyone who’s interested to check out some resources I know that ICA group has them listed on their website and we’ll link it here as well to share with you. But for us, democratic member control means we have a board that leads our organization as well. But it’s also how does democratic member control look like when we’re doing, like a values process. How do we make sure we have input from our members and our worker-owners and plan for the decision to be made by the board? So, look at other places around you or partners of your organization, or if you belong to a coalition that can also give you some guiding principles for how you address and reflect on a co-creation process. Claire, I wanna make sure that you get the credit for leading this process. And also there are so many members of our teams who took on different roles. We’re lucky enough to have copywriters on staff and designers, you know, so there is a very bright and beautiful element of our values. But any suggestions that you would share about how do you articulate them? Any specific structures and what should organizations consider for creative expression?

Claire Taylor Hansen: Well, thank you for the shout-out and I will forward it along to our copywriter team, which are Nicole and Ryan as well as help from many folks on staff and to who did the wordsmithing. But what we like to think about with the creative expression is first you just need to get the ideas right, and not worry so much about the final articulation. Then work on the creative expression and the wordsmithing. So when you’re getting the survey for staff and getting all that feedback, it’s really about getting feedback on the ideas and then letting the folks who are professional writers work on the expression because then you avoid trying to have to integrate every single person’s grammatical feedback and instead get feedback on what are the really underlying ideas underneath. So it’s really like a funnel or making a sculpture where you start with the big moves and then you get more and more detailed as you go along.

Claire Taylor Hansen: And then in terms of the structure, you can look at lots of different models. You could start with a leading word, we worked with an organization called Keshet. We can link to the case study in the podcast notes, where they started with a leading word like justice, pride, human dignity. I guess that’s two words. And then had a sentence that unpacks what that meant to them as an organization. Like what did they mean by justice? You could have belief statements as values. So, “We believe that X” or “We believe that Y”. So, there’s lots of different ways you can structure it and it can really come out of and flow out of what the initial concepting and brainstorming kind of led from. You can let the final form reflect the natural evolution of what folks’ ideas are leading towards to solve that problem of how to actually shape it.

Brenda Perez: How many drafts would you say? Because I feel like that’s also a challenge. “We have the thing and it should be perfect the first time!” You know, but that’s never the case.

Claire Taylor Hansen: That’s a great question, Brenda. So for our clients, we try and do it in four, and for us, I think we made it in five. And I will say there was a last-minute kind of integrity check where we had been so careful to get them perfect and get them right and get them reflective of the staff that they kind of lost some of their magic and were starting to lose some of the ideas that were underneath them because we’re so worried about making them perfect in a way. Actually around round three or round four, we got to a place where they were “done,” but they were really long and they were very boring and they were not very emotional or motivating and values are supposed to be motivating and exciting for staff. And so even though they were technically reflective of all the feedback that we had, they didn’t kind of reflect the underlying ideas that people offered, or the spirit of the ideas that people were offered. So then round four was really about, “Okay, let’s cut these in half. Let’s try and keep the most important ideas and distill them and challenge ourselves to bring some creativity to this.” And without changing the intention, without undermining or moving away from all the feedback that was offered so that they still reflected what people shared. Really shorten and condense and make them come to life. And so that was the kind of last round was to just make them more exciting and motivational for folks.

Brenda Perez: And I think that speaks to mapping out a process, right? If we had planned to be like, we’re gonna get this all done in one round and we’re really not gonna have something that really reflects the membership or your stakeholders, but really plan for those rounds to look differently and talk about the process with your staff and team, so nobody was like surprised.

Brenda Perez: One of the values that I, that I really value, value that I really value, is experiment. Is “We experiment” and we use a beautiful emoji with the little test tube and then we follow it with like “Curiosity sparks our creativity. We venture beyond conventional boundaries and explore new ideas with an open forward-thinking mindset.” And for me, this has like allowed us to use our values and we encourage new ideas when there’s something in our process fits like okay, but not awesome. We are able to lean into our values to be like, “Hey, let’s make this adjustment.” You know, because this is something that we are committed to. So, they’re helpful. So that’s one of the ways that I use values to also help us ground the culture that you want to build. We use it in our onboarding process, in our hiring. I know that when people are applying at Big Duck, they see the values and we talk about how we bring them into action.

Brenda Perez: Also, I find it really helpful to just bring staff alignment or project alignment when we’re working through a project for a client and we’re solving an issue that is like unforeseen or the client didn’t even know they had, it’s really nice to be able to like ground in the values of like, “Okay, how are we gonna do really great work? How are we gonna succeed? How’s the me and the we show up here? And like how do we experiment to come up with the best results?” I also think good values point you in the direction of the growth, right? Like if there’s any sort of conflict or dispute that you have to figure out, whether that’s a small thing, the color of a slide deck or, like, an internal conversation. I feel like the values really give you a space to center outside of the conflict and be like, “What are we building towards? What’s our future orientation look like?” And come up with solutions.

Brenda Perez: And then I also think in finances, finances can seem so objective, but budgets are moral documents. So when we put our values alongside our budgets, it gives us a nice reflection point to ensure that, “Oh, are we operating our business in the way that we’ve committed to?’ So I think those are just some fun ways to consider how you can bring your values to life. Anything that you would wanna add there, Claire?

Claire Taylor Hansen: Yeah, just from an external lens, those are mostly some internal examples of where they live, but they can be powerful external messaging tools too. So you can put them on your website if that feels appropriate to you as an organization, which can maybe attract the right folks to your team or kind of showcase who you are and who you stand for to your community. You can put it in things like your proposals or your RFPss. And then also they can be, not always doesn’t make sense to always, but they can be if it makes sense for your organization, depending on how they shape out, part of your swag or printed on materials. So it just kind of depends on what makes sense and what’s appropriate, but they can be really powerful external communications tools as well.

Brenda Perez: Yeah. Thank you Claire for expanding on those examples of like how our values not just live inside of an organization, but actually take a physical presence outside on our swag and a bookmark or anything that you want it to be. Thank you all for joining and listening to this. We hope you have found some good stuff about how you question and bring your values into a process with your team. So thanks again.

Claire Taylor Hansen: Thank you.