How do some of the best companies in the world bring company values to life for employees? If you have a set of core values, how can you lift them off the page so that the whole business understands and embraces the culture they're part of?

1. Ideabook:
How to build and amplify
values to achieve commercial
objectives
Created by Onefish Twofish for Buinsess Leaders, HR, Customer Services Directors
and Organisational Development Directors
hello@onefishtwofish.co.uk | 07769 708490

3. The Onefish Twofish
Employee Heart-Mind Machine
Employee communication is where
the rubber hits the road. It’s what
turns a plan or a good idea into a
business outcome, co-delivered by
every single employee you have.
The Onefish Twofish Employee Heart/Mind Machine is used in 12 major
brands to achieve commercial outcomes through comms.

5. Most big companies have well-established values.
If these values represent ‘how we behave at our best’ then
there is usually a big opportunity to bring them into
sharper focus.

6. Specifically, if values pervaded every team, decision
and customer interaction, you could expect an
increase in sales, loyalty, innovation, cost savings etc.
What happens?
Average spend
Cost of customer acquisition
Net Promoter Score
Employee productivity
Unwanted leavers
Market winning products
Fixed cost based

7. The value chain : start with the commercials
what are you trying to achieve?
Customers
respond by being
more loyal,
spending more,
recommending
more
Innovation is
fostered,
efficiency
improves, cost
savings are made
Average spend
Cost of customer acquisition
Net Promoter Score
Employee productivity
Unwanted leavers
Market winning products
Fixed cost based
Employees
understand the
‘value the values’
They increasingly
work and challenge
in line with the
values
Customers
expectations
and needs are
better met
Internal
relationships
strength with a
common language
and focus
Employees enjoy
a more rewarding
role and a more
consistent culture
Employees give
discretionary
effort and are
more likely
to stay

8. Question 1:
Values for What?
Values that made
us successful
in the past
The values
that will
make us
successful
in the future
The values
we aspire to
right now
THE PAST the present THE FUTURE

9. Question 2:
How will you systematically amplify?

10. Concept:
the values matrix

11. child
adult
parent
child
adult
parent
Concept: transactional analysis for comms
Parent - child:
Content not context,
restricting
information, telling,
stick, spinning
difficult info, jargon,
power struggle.
Outcome:
Compliance
Adult - adult:
Context not content,
sharing neutral facts,
dialogue, trusting the
detail to the employee,
carrot.
Outcome:
responsibility

13. Concept: knowing where values are
expressed?
• How and what information is shared
and how it’s framed
• How we interact with customers
• How we our manager interacts with us
• How we treat people in our team
• How we treat people in other teams
• What promises / expectations are met,
and which are not
• What we challenge, what we walk past
• How decisions are made
• What decisions are made
• The level of risk the company takes
• Whether we collaborate, mandate or
just operate
• The pace at which things are done
(micro and macro)
• What is given priority/airtime (and
what isn’t)
• What is recognised and rewarded
• How we choose and work with
suppliers
• What we put extra effort into and what
we ‘tick the box of’ or even cut corners
• What we see around us in the
workplace
• Who we hire and how

14. Values audit
What’s going on?
Where are the
opportunities for
improvement?

15. Step One: a values audit.
Purpose: what action is going to have the greatest impact?
• How well are values understood?
• Are your values fit for the future?
• Do negative values pervade?
• What’s the crossover between personal
and company values
• How do values break down across
different employee groups?
• Which employee experiences are
values roadblocks?
<idiot>
I get it!!
I don’t

16. Step two: cross business values workshops
talking time, frank discussion and debate…
Result: values in action – examples and ‘how’

17. Negative Values in action Positive

18. Ok done that, now
what?

19. How can we create change?
3. Make values the easy road
Create congruence between what the business says, does and rewards
Get some key people to very explicitly and visibly live it
Change what managers do – measure for outcomes
2. Give values energy
Create visibility and energy
Make it inspiring but face valid
Engender personal responsibility – it’s not ok to walk past
1. Give values meaning
Tie to an intent
Win people over, don’t push or pull
Paint a picture, bring good to life
Create ownership – heart of the business, don’t
point at it from the top

20. Give values
meaning
Make it worth getting
out of bed for

21. The ‘cover
the logo’ test
– an early
test of our
approach
When we started working with PizzaExpress back in
2008, we knew we had come across a quite remarkable
business.
At an early meeting, we put forward a really great
ideabook – we thought! It was full of our best ideas,
moodboards, video storyboards. We hoped they’d love it.
What happened? The Marketing Director covered up the
PizzaExpress logo we had carefully put on the document
and said “How is this different from what you would
have proposed for any other company? How is this
different from Strada, from Giraffe, from Wagamamma?
There are plenty of inspirational ideas here. But they’re
not PizzaExpress ideas yet”.
We learnt a lesson that day. A product is easy to copy. An
employee is easy to train. A BRAND is unique – its
heritage, its style, its reputation, its personality. Align
everything around delivering ‘your brand at its very best’
and you will see some incredible things happen.

22. Start with WHY
If you hire people just because
they can do a job, they’ll work for
your money, if you hire people
who believe what you believe,
they’ll work for you with blood
and sweat and tears.”
Simon Sinek

28. Big personality
Whether your personality
is trusted grey hair,
master craftsman or
quirky innovators –
amplify it

29. Every company has a personality. The point
is… if it was a person would you want to work
for him/her?
Every company here has a personality. A history. Stuff that’s unique. Stuff that’s interesting. You don’t have to
be a high street chain or sell cool technology to have an engaging personality.
This is your opportunity. Find it. Play up what’s unique. Engagement… for free!
HOW?
• Carve a niche that the market is craving – don’t try to be everything to everyone.
• Give people confidence in it, help them become experts in it.
• Find out: What do clients value?
• Be a tribe. What do tribes do?

30. Give values energy
and visibility

31. Grow your own
What it is
• “That’s great – now let’s see if we can make it
even bigger and better”
• Visionary – good at imagining a bigger and
better future and realising it
• Creativity - “There must be a way” “Anything is
possible”
• Evangelism – a passion to share the word
• Value for growth – standing still is going
backwards, the only way is up
What it isn’t
• Kicking back in the comfort zone
• Cineworld-limiting beliefs - “The market just
isn’t there any more” “People in Wareham don’t
go to the movies that much” “No one will pay
that…”
• Self limiting beliefs - “I don’t think I could be
any good at that”
• Complacency - “I’m experienced, I don’t need to
learn anything more”
We love to create and grow, making
something bigger and better than when
we started. Growing our skills, our
market share, an army of customer
fans – Cineworld people take
something good and make it great.

32. Make history
What it is
• Bringing the true movie experience to every
every customer at every showing
• Heart, soul and character in everything we do
• Valuing our roots and prizing our heritage
• Being at the forefront of innovation – the ‘new
history’
• A passion for film – “We love film, we love the
perks – I come here with my family on my day
off”
• Valuing experience, longevity and loyalty
What it isn’t
• Throwing out the old for no good reason
• Being bland
• A soul-less machine
• Forgetting where we’ve come from
• Commoditisation
• Old fashioned and out of date
• Irrelevant, missing the point
We’ve come a long way. Our roots
are in good old-fashioned cinema
and the movie experience. We’re at
the heart of British cinema tradition
and we continue to make history.

33. Communicate difficult things simply

34. Make high performance tangible
The critical part: show, demonstrate, clarify, discuss,
explain, illustrate
• Get high performers to show and tell what they do.
• Ask their customers to describe what’s special and how it feels.
• Share these unique, tangible things on film, on paper, on the
‘shop floor’ – take it out
• Make it practical. Use human language. Make it fun.
• Be specific. Use colourful examples. Show the impact not just
the action.
• Assume everyone is there to do a fantastic job. Don’t state the
obvious…

35. Playing up what’s unique at Google

36. Revamp induction

37. Tell stories

38. Curate video from smartphones around the
world…

39. Toolkits, templates and tone of voice
Upskill the entire business as they deliver
their own part of the values plan – from
day to day emails. This includes:
• Tone of voice and style guide
• Templates (not to constrain but to
speed up regular, core comms)
• 1:1 support for GMs, exec team

40. Change the physical environment

41. Another way to reach people: produce a lifestyle guide
that ties into your business’ personality. For
PizzaExpress this was a ‘recipe book’: how to make
dough balls, where the amazing secret beaches are in
Italy, what’s the best wine, music, art etc for PE lovers…
These are designed to be taken home, to bridge the gap
between work and passions outside of work.
Bridge the gap between ‘work’ and ‘me’

42. Get a REAL dialogue going: World Café or
UnConference
• Bottom up approach to setting strategy
alight
• Used everywhere from middle east
peace talks to Vodafone
• Only open to managers and below
• Table/café format – faciliation and
theme for each table
• Good food, good coffee
• Video, cartoon used to draw the energy
and ideas to the surface
• Coffee tables are the drawing board
• Personally, visually and
corporately memorable
• Drives real change – they’ve
already lived it

44. Straighten the
path
Take away barriers,
create carrots

45. Things to align
Revamp flow of information
Launch the values (film,
postcard, roadshow)
Launch employee charter
Empower sites
Upskill comms across
business
Revamp attraction,
recruitment and
induction
Update Perf Mgt
process
Introduce a new kind of
recognition
Contribute to customer
service programme
Manager roadshows

46. Launch employee charter
• The employee charter is the ‘employer side of the
bargain’ of the employer brand. It outlines what you will
deliver for colleagues – the internal brand promise.
• It can be formal e.g. The Employee Charter which lists
out a forma list of promises or very informal e.g. for
Cineworld ‘What is Cinework?’ which simply brings the
employer brand to life, framed from the employee
perspective
• The launch is likely to be part of the values launch (it’s
the other side of the psychological contract you are
making as you ask employees to live the values)

47. Update performance mgmt
• Review and update the current competency
framework, building on the existing values and:
– Aligning the behaviours with the values
– Lifting the values off the page with
examples of high performance across sites
and head office
• Updating the performance management
process to make it as engaging and easy to
deliver as possible

48. Empower sites to engage
• Engagement at a site level is very powerful.
Without this, the risk is that sites treat business
wide wide engagement as a tick box exercise or at
worst bypass it entirely (particularly if it is values-
based rather than operational)
• Site-centric engagement grows a life of its own,
starting with inspired managers. It’s achieved
through:
– Manager engagement – a future vision to
work towards, plus a hard performance
element
– A tribe approach – sites work to bring out
what’s amazing about their
team/approach/creativity/people and share
this with others
– Locally focused activities e.g. employee
premieres, local charity contribution

49. Recognition
• Create tangible ways to recognise and reward a) exceptional
delivery of the customer brand and b) exceptional delivery of the
values (the two are closely aligned but warrant separate
recognition).
• Key rewards:
– Empower local managers to organise small, regular ‘treats’ e.g.
a round of starbucks coffee for a reaching a milestone
– A range of wider ranging awards for sites/managers to shoot
for: best mystery shopper result, fastest growth, best customer
feedback, best employee feedback, most creative premiere

50. Contribute to customer journey
• The customer service project will revitalise the
customer journey, from end to end and the values
and employer brand can play a role in inspiring this
and providing the ‘how’.
• This means:
– Using the values to define how to create the
high touchpoints at every stage e.g. “What
would Cineworld do?”
– Communicating and inspiring the development
programme associated with the customer
services/customer journey refresh

51. Refresh flow of internal info
• Map all current flow of information, specifically:
– From leaders to employees (direct, indirect
and via managers)
– From employees to managers and leaders
– Between head office and sites
– Across sites and business units
• Building on what’s already working, create a plan
which streamlines and closes any gaps, providing
the optimum flow of information
• This includes timing, format, messaging,
tone/look and feel and content
• It’s more likely to be a refresh than a revamp

52. Things we can make happen for you
• Complete Values Audit – what’s going on right now?
• Values to Real Life – interview, film, observe what high performers actually DO
• Tear Down the Barriers Programme – find and fix the barriers to living the
values (from process to how meetings are run to how quickly people walk around the
office!)
• Not The Values launch – no one wants to read about ‘our new values’. They do
want to see energy behind stuff that is clearly good and important. We do the values
launch without the yadda-yadda.
• High performance values illustration – through film, content, show & tell and
stories, we change average performers’ minds
• Recruitment and induction transformation – we transform the style and tools
of getting and inducting the right people so that they
• Performance management alignment – update competencies and the whole
performance process so that it is energising, values-led and performance building
(not the ‘dreaded appraisal’)
• Local tribe development – get the whole company creating their own ‘team strip’
and communicating adult-to-adult and in line with the values.

53. Our key employee comms clients

54. What next?
We can help you design a
programme and give you lots of
inspiration and cost options.
hello@onefishtwofish.co.uk