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Writer's pictureSophy Robinson
4 days ago8 min read

What is the value of corporate values?


By Sophy Robinson


Sophy is a former trustee of Humanists UK and she has worked for many years as a performance coach in large global corporate and UK public sector organisations. In this article, she asks why publicly declaring corporate values has become so fashionable in recent years and whether they actually mean anything.



I knew nothing about the world of corporate values until I went to work at Mars Confectionery in Slough, UK, in 1986. The Mars Group was/is a privately-owned colossus: then still run by descendants of the family-founders John and Forrest Mars. It was famed for its innovative approach to management. So, as I neared my 30th birthday I joined to become a ‘Zone 6 associate’ in the Human Resources (HR) division. There were no trade unions because HR ruled the roost. Any ‘bad’ managers were quickly dealt with and high pay rates meant jobs were much sought after.


The Mars Wrigley manufacturing plant in Cleveland, Tennessee, produces M&Ms and Twix bars

The culture seemed really weird. I did feel I’d landed on another planet! The in-your-face promotion of the five Values was alien, and I was expected to learn and say them like a mantra:


  1. Quality: Mars strives to deliver the best to their customers, both people and pets 

  2. Responsibility: Mars takes responsibility without being asked and supports the responsibilities of others 

  3. Mutuality: Mars believes in creating a mutual benefit for a broad range of groups 

  4. Efficiency: Mars uses resources wisely, wastes nothing, and does only what they can do best 

  5. Freedom: Mars believes in the freedom to shape their future


Sophy at Mars in 1986

As a newly-recruited female associate I was told that they wanted me to act as a change-agent, to shake up the culture and rise to the top of the management tree, while being respected, and valued as an equal. I lasted a year before deciding that the culture was so sexist and toxic – and not at all what the recruiters promised – that my future lay elsewhere! After a series of provocations, the final outrage was an HR associate meeting where the newly-promoted Zone 3 director surveyed his team, turned to me and said “Ah Sophy, I’ve decided what we are going to call you – we’ll call you ‘Dusty’ because you are single and on the shelf!”


Despite my disgust at the time, I remain eternally grateful to Mars because I moved straight into HR consultancy, and could then dine out on the best of what I’d learnt, with clients eager to lap up the world of culture change, employee engagement and corporate values. These approaches to management are now de rigeur in the business world, and perhaps Mars has profoundly changed in recent decades, living up to the principles on its website today.


Over the last 30 years, a vast consulting industry has grown up around corporate values. Some of the results are indeed laughable, as they were to me in Mars. My experience suggests that values can indeed be important and help businesses clarify what they are about, beyond the pure profit motive. But which values are valuable, and which involve cynical manipulation of customers, including, for example, those which have become known as "greenwashing"? To inform this article, and build on my former consulting and business coaching experience, I’ve done some more research.  Here is a distillation of what I’ve found.


How to create company values that actually resonate

First call was the Harvard Business Review, where many experts debate company values. For the October 2023 issue, authors Shawn Pope (a Paris-based strategy professor) and Arild Waeraas (a public policy professor in Oslo) set out to tell their readers "How to Create Company Values That Actually Resonate". They write: “Too many statements of corporate values are generic business clichés. Is it any wonder few employees can actually remember them? To fix the problem, companies are typically advised to double down on communication. The usual advice is to post the core values in even more places and mention them more often in reports and meetings. The hope is that, with enough repetition, the core values will eventually be drummed into everyone’s skull.” The authors are concerned that what is commonly adopted is “a laundry list of generic, taken-for-granted assumptions like honesty, integrity, accountability, and responsibility”. They set out five tips (summarised below) with examples of good practice, to deal with this problem.


Be Creative

Break the mindset and be more imaginative!  They cite companies that have taken different routes: Johnson & Johnson has a credo, Ford Motor has truths, Toyota a way, Google beliefs, and North Face a manifesto.  Alternatives suggested are tenets, precepts, adages, axioms, a motto, a mantra or a maxim. 


Keep Them Brief

Limit the core values to four: the maximum length that people can usually remember, and only include those critical to the business. Examples included are: H&M with “Cost-Consciousness” which is key to the company’s competitive positioning, and U.S. supermarket Meijer’s  “Freshness”. However, Delta Airlines’ “Honesty” and Microsoft’s  “Integrity” are said to be just too obvious!


Make Them Easy to Remember

Adopt the "serial position effect": namely those first and last in a list will have most impact. A mnemonic will also help. The chemical company BASF arranged its core values into the word CORE, for Creative, Open, Responsible, Entrepreneurial.


Use Distinctive Language

Avoid dull, impersonal or sluggish words and be distinctive and unexpected.  Examples are: “We own it” rather than “Accountability” (Kraft Heinz), “We go the extra mile” rather than “Service”  (Toyota),  “Quality is job one” (Ford), “Fun Family Entertainment” (Disney) and “Move fast and break things” (Facebook). Alliteration, metaphor, plosives, assonance, imperatives, rhyme and rhythm are recommended: and examples given are “A will to win” (American Express), “We are sponges” (Nike), “Passion for Invention” (Amazon), “Integrity, Excellence, and Respect for People” (Eli Lilly).


Make It Visible

Finally, design your values for memory and visual appeal such as a company relevant emblem. The "picture superiority effect" is advocated, namely that images speak louder than words. So a car maker could have a “values wheel” with spokes; and a construction company a “values ladder” where the rungs are the values in ascending importance.


It seems to me that much of this advice assumes that the problem of values lacking resonance and impact is due to their design and the use of language. My experience suggests a more fundamental set of challenges. As Curt Steinhorst observed in his article ‘Rethinking the Value of Core Values’: “How can we know if a company’s values are a reflection of reality, or a contrived attempt to reinforce a façade? In any community, values are extracted, lived, and felt – not scripted. They come from what is shared and often unwritten; they create identity and belonging; and, together, they act as a compass. While they may also be aspirational, they don’t start from a list of sanitized terms or hipster buzzwords”.


How has the need for corporate values arisen?

You might wonder why the need for values has arisen? The 20th century saw the creation of larger and larger companies, leading to vast global entities spanning many different countries and employing people of great cultural diversity. In the "good old days" we lived, and worked, with the same community of people; and there was little disconnect between the values baked into the local community and those of the local organisation. Today, a workforce is often made up of people with fragmented identities. They use social media to communicate and, if they don’t work from home, might be based in virtual camps or office locations that are thousands of miles apart, or from their origins. If you were to join Google, Primark or Ikea etc., you may have little in common with your co-workers beyond, say, the ability to sell, write reports, do data analysis or write code.


Steinhorst argues: “This is why a company’s core values should serve as a cultural adhesive wherever the goal is to engage the talents, interests, and backgrounds of those in the organization for maximum productivity and, yes, for good. Like glue, a values statement must celebrate the diversity of those it brings into the company, and give all of them clear points of connection that allow them to bond.” The challenge for the corporate giants is to develop concepts that reflect the diversity of geography, socioeconomics, religions, race, gender, education, and much more. 


Case study: Lush

The UK cosmetics company Lush (headquartered in Poole, Dorset) is often cited as a good example of having achieved this – an ethical company that has created a coherent business model which, nevertheless, operates across about 50 countries globally. Founded by a husband and wife team in 1995, it started life as a shop on the High Street in Poole, creating cosmetics from freshly purchased fruits and vegetables. 30 years later, it produces and sells around 110 million units including creams, soaps, shampoos, shower gels, lotions, scrubs and masks. With sales of around £700-800m it has established and, it seems, mostly kept to its stated corporate values. These are presented in some detail on its website, and include a commitment to ethical sourcing, transparency, and the use of only natural and largely vegan ingredients sourced from suppliers who share its values of fairness, sustainability, and animal welfare. It has established an Employee Benefit Trust (EBT) and in 2017 gifted 10% of its shares to staff. The EBT gives some voting rights to staff, bonuses in some years, and includes staff-elected representatives in every Lush location. Yet even Lush has faced some controversy. For example, while praising much of its approach, the Ethical Consumer website reports: “Our research highlights some ethical issues with Lush, including environmental reporting, toxic chemicals, human rights, and supply chain management.”  


A complex ethical and financial dilemma

In a Vox article analysing "The problem with corporate 'values’", Anna Held argues: “Values can (and should) force hard decisions... Values are priceless, but they are not free. Backing up your core values statements has financial implications, but they are worth it.” Curt Steinhorst agrees: “Values are a long-term commitment. Research indicates that prioritizing community and employee satisfaction does have positive long-term financial gains, but to actually live up to their promises takes resources, and as a rule, short-term financial priorities win out over any value statement, no matter how detailed.” It’s a complex ethical and financial dilemma, arising largely from the shareholder model. “The longstanding defense of the shareholder model is that it is the most likely to ensure the survival of the business, which is good for everyone. In practice, though, limiting the end goal of companies to making money for shareholders has shifted gains from worker productivity to shareholders; stagnating wages and stifling economic growth.  In 2019, the average CEO made 320 times as much money as the average worker.” As Anna Held writes: “No situation is perfect, and I could cite examples from many companies to illustrate that – but the point is to move toward that higher plane where a company’s core values have actual value to the people it hopes to hire, retain, and form into a community that can withstand the challenges of distracted, divisive, and mercurial times. It takes hard work because there is no magical shortcut to establishing them for any one enterprise.”


Indeed, as a privately owned company, Lush can perhaps afford the "luxury" of adhering to its stated values. Conventional financial investors might criticise Lush’s track record of relatively low profit margins for its size of operation. As reported in The Guardian in July 2023, it paid out about £16m in bonuses to staff over two years despite profits plummeting by 90% in 2022 as a result of the pandemic, geopolitical disruption and its decision to withdraw from social media. Meanwhile, its company directors also received bonuses of £5 million on top of their salaries.


Humanist capitalism?

The Italian clothing billionaire Brunello Cucinelli (estimated wealth $3.7 billion) addressed the G20 summit in 2021 with a passionate description of the benevolent principles that drive his company. He clearly believes in his version of "humanist capitalism", but with his gear selling at jaw-dropping prices (e.g. women’s blazers about $5,000, a man’s cashmere bomber jacket almost $9,500), I find it hard to swallow his talk of humanist corporate values. “I wanted a company that made healthy profits, but did so with ethics, dignity and morals; we are listed on the stock exchange, I wanted a company that had a balanced and gracious growth. I wanted human beings to work in slightly better places, earn a little more in wages and feel like thinking souls at work. Let us try not to turn our backs on poverty.”


Conclusion

Hmm... maybe the hypocrisy of so-called values that I encountered all those years ago in Mars, has just become more embedded in the corporate world and sometimes, I fear to say, yet more brazen. As humanists, and consumers, we can all do our bit by actively questioning the stated values of business leaders, and using our purchasing power as leverage to support the principled companies who get closest to really doing as they say they do.    


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