Transcript: How to Create Guiding Principles for an Organization

The following transcript is from an interview between Lacey Halpern, HR Business Partner at Xenium HR, Joy McCormick, Senior Payroll Specialist at Xenium HR, and Brandon Laws, Marketing Manager at Xenium HR, on the podcast episode entitled: How to Create Guiding Principles for an Organization
Brandon: Welcome everybody! We’re back for another podcast. Today I have with me Lacey Halpern, an HR Business Partner at Xenium, and another guest, Joy McCormick, Payroll Specialist at Xenium. Today we’re going to talk about what guiding principles mean to an organization. Welcome, both of you, I appreciate you spending some time with us.
Lacey: Thanks.
Joy: Thank you!
Brandon: I want to get your perspective on the “Xenium Promise” is. Lacey, could you start out by telling listeners what it is and how it came about?
Lacey: Sure. The “Xenium Promise” is really a foundation of values or guiding principles that we have as an organization to help us to make decisions as a business, set objectives for the year, and determine how we interact with each other and with our clients, as well as how we show up in the community. A long time ago, Xenium had something called “The Xenium Covenant.” I wasn’t part of the team that put that together, but it had a lot of different values and principles. There are still a few people on our team who were part of putting that covenant together. As a company we decided that it would be a good idea to take a look at the covenant and give it a little bit of a refresh with the help of new employees who weren’t here when it was put together. The covenant still is a living document here, and we talk about it often, but the “Xenium Promise” is a more concise version of it that resonates with our employees.
Brandon: I think you made a good point: that it resonates with people. Because I think a lot of the principles are actionable. We’ll talk about some of those things later.
Joy, from your perspective as a newer employee at the time, do you remember what that covenant looked like? You were part of the committee who helped redefine the “Xenium Promise.” Could you give us your perspective on coming in as a new employee—do you remember what the covenant was, and were you able to live by it? Maybe that’s not the best way to put it, but did it resonate with you, as Lacey said? Also, what did that process of creating the “Xenium Promise” mean to you?
Joy: There were definitely a lot of great principles that were in the covenant. It was from the original founding members of this team, and it was a really great document. I had never seen anything like it in any other businesses I’d ever worked for—theirs was always about their business goal and how they were going to make money. It wasn’t about how people would treat each other in the business or how they would treat their clients. I found the covenant to be really refreshing.
I think it did need to be revised, as it was very wordy and hard to remember each of the items in there. I think it was really great to have the whole team be able to give their input on what it was that they really liked out of the original document and what it was they wanted to see in a future document.
Brandon: Could you talk a little bit more about that process? From the covenant, which was, to your point, written in long form, it was hard to memorize. I think that’s why we wanted to transition to more of a guiding principles list format. What was that process like, to take the covenant in its current form and then having all the employees and this committee help mold it into something else? I’m sure other companies are thinking about this process or going through it right now.
Joy: It took a lot of commitment from the whole team that was involved in going through it. We had multiple meetings over a few months to go back and forth over the information and picking out the individual points in the original covenant and putting them into a SurveyMonkey. The rest of the employees could give their input on what it was that they liked and what they didn’t want to see in there that didn’t resonate with them in the survey. Once we had all the feedback, we went over it all again and hashed through it to determine the strongest points that people really want to continue to see, and what are the things that we could call out or condense into shorter bullet points that are easier to remember.
Brandon: I remember going through those survey results and thinking, “Okay, here are the favorite statements—what do we do now?” Lacey, could you talk about that?
Lacey: I think what we identified was that there were themes, and from that SurveyMonkey we were able to identify the different buckets that our different values could go into. We came up with four, and the goal was then to create some actionable items to list underneath. For example, one of the pieces of our promise is to “Speak Openly and Sincerely.” That could mean a whole bunch of different things, and what I loved about the work we put into it—and I agree with Joy that it was time consuming and crazy. There were times we were debating over commas.
Brandon: Ha ha, it was ridiculous! We had four or five meetings over an hour and a half apiece I think. For people listening, we want you to be aware that it takes more than one simple meeting. We had a committee, so there were multiple people trying to make decisions on this.
Lacey: Right, and there were some people on our committee who actually are writers and had so much value to add. Then there were those of us who maybe weren’t as well versed in writing and felt passionately about certain items that needed to be in there. So there was a lot of dialogue that went on.
Brandon: That’s a great word, “passion.” We went back and forth on the craziest little things, but it was so exciting to see what everybody felt about this. They were so passionate about this and they wanted it to be perfect. Everybody really put their heart and soul into this thing.
Lacey: Right. And the committee was made up of employees, so it wasn’t just the senior leadership team here at Xenium who came up with these and said, “This is how you’re going to behave. This is how you’re going to act.” We nominated one another to be on the committee, and you could nominate yourself if you really wanted to be a part of it. So everyone who was involved, maybe 8 or 9 of us, really cared about it and wanted to be a part of this. They made the time commitment and the emotional commitment to be a part of it, and in the end we did end up presenting it to our senior leadership team. They really only made a few changes to it, just a couple words here and there. It was done by a group of people who really embody the “Xenium Promise” anyway. We were just speaking from our heart when we were putting it together.
Brandon: I do remember that when we passed it to our executive team, they helped us define those buckets. We had a long list of principles and were refining that, but there was something still missing, and that’s when we passed it to the senior leadership team. They helped turn it into what it is today.
In transitioning from the committee to the senior leadership team, Joy, do you remember the first time you saw the buckets and how you felt as an employee and committee member that helped develop this set of principles? The buckets are: “Take Ownership for My Success,” “Speak Openly and Sincerely,” “Be a Source of Inspiration,” and “Develop and Foster Relationships.”
Joy: I loved it. I loved the way everything fell into simple areas we could refer back to, with three or four bullet points for each of these buckets. It was so much easier on the eyes to be able to look at this list and be able to read through it. I felt the way each principle was named really ran true for everything we were trying to put into this document.
I think sometimes when you have a huge group that’s trying to come together with all these ideas, we were trying to figure out the best way to lay them out so that everyone will love this.
Brandon: Not only love it, but use it.
Joy: Right.
Brandon: From an HR perspective and from the culture side, how do we integrate this? This is so foundational to the culture, and from my perspective, as a marketing guy, the employer brand as well.
Lacey: Like Joy, I hadn’t worked for a company that had these types of values in practice. I’ve been with organizations where there have been values or different things. They’re on the wall, they look really pretty in a nice font, they’re framed up and some employees even have it on their desk. But it has never been alive. The “Xenium Covenant” was alive at Xenium, and I think this was a way to make it even more alive. That’s the piece that often gets missed when companies go through a culture process of identifying who they are, who they want to be, putting some language around it, distributing it to the employees, and then it’s just done. Integrating it into your people practices is where the rubber meets the road.
I think we’ve done a really good job, but I think there’s lots more work for us to do in our XCITE committee. For the folks listening, XCITE is our employee satisfaction or culture committee that works to integrate the “Xenium Promise” into the fun and exciting pieces of the company. It’s incorporated into our employee feedback, job descriptions and performance review system. We have an employee of the month program and employees are encouraged to take a look at the Promise and identify who in the company has done things that embody the “Promise.” A nominator provides specific examples which we share at our all team meeting each month.
Brandon: I want to pull the string on that a little bit. You mentioned the performance review system and employee of the month nominations. When you’re talking about giving feedback, we categorize it using the statements of the “Promise.” That makes it specific, because they have to give an example of how someone is living the “Xenium Promise.”
Lacey: Right. The bullets have tenets under them. For example, under “Take Ownership for My Success” one of the examples in the “Promise” is “I will develop myself personally and professionally.” That’s really easy to articulate and really easy to say, “What examples do I have of instances over the last year where I’ve developed myself, personally and professionally?” It’s easy for a manager to come up with that. Our managers here at Xenium are evaluating performance not just based on the competencies of the position. That’s important, but it’s not everything. We’ve all heard about employees who have the skills to do the job and are great at that, but they just don’t have the culture fit. This is where we can really evaluate and identify the folks who are embodying the “Promise,” and retain those people.
Brandon: What do you think we could do as far as using this to find new talent? I know other people and other companies are looking for ways to attract people to their organization. Do you think this is a great way to do that, and how would you even do that?
Joy: I think it’s part of the interview process. Maybe even bringing this out and saying, “These are the principles we prefer to live by.”
Brandon: Or, “Give us an example of how you did this.”
Joy: Yeah, exactly. I think we do some of that in our phone interviews. For example, “What’s something that you’re really proud of?” I think we should incorporate these into the phone interview process and face-to-face interviews as well because it really is important for us to have a good culture fit as well. We don’t want to go through the process of training somebody and trying to get them to understand how we do things here if they’re not already a good culture fit.
Lacey: I agree. Brandon, maybe you could speak to the external brand we put on our website. Because our “Promise” is on the website, too, right?
Brandon: Yes, the “Promise” is on the website. There’s the HR side of attracting people and keeping people because they believe in the “Promise” and all those actions. On the marketing side, we’re trying to attract employers who think and believe the same things we do. I think that by publishing the “Xenium Promise” and showing that we honor our commitments, we’re solution-oriented, we speak and communicate very clearly, and we deliver proactive, transparent communication—I think those are the sort of things people want to hear about, and I think that’s going to attract a certain type of employer to work with us.
I think naturally we want to do business and be friends with people who act and think like us. So I think there’s no problem with publishing the “Xenium Promise” and being very forthright about it. Same with employees and prospective employees.
Lacey: Right. I appreciated too that when I first started at Xenium, one of the first things that I remember hearing about in my orientation is that we work with well-intended employers. And while that’s not necessarily in our “Xenium Promise,” I think it goes without saying that we really do want to do business with and have clients who care about people. Xenium cares about its people, and about seeing that on the client side and the employee side. It’s just like how you’re the same employee you are at work as you are at home. I just really love that Xenium cares enough about its employees that we really take this “Promise” into consideration when we’re considering a new client.
Brandon: It’s almost like the “Promise” and any principles are the second step behind a purpose statement. You have a mission and vision for your organization and yourself as a human being. Then these principles are more the “how” than the why. That’s how I feel about it. Because we’ve truly, to your point, integrated this throughout our culture. We speak about it in our performance review systems, all those aspects of our organization. It’s pretty interesting.
Have either of you run across companies that have something very similar? Obviously the “Xenium Promise” is unique to Xenium, but have clients of yours or other business you look up to and admire have their principles out in the open?
Joy: As I said earlier, I hadn’t ever worked for any other company that actually had something like this that they wanted to be a living document and part of their culture. It was truly refreshing to come into a company that had this outlook and wanted their employees to be involved in the running of the business and to be very open with the employees as opposed to having the attitude of “everything’s behind closed doors, just do what you’re supposed to.”
Lacey: I felt fortunate that in the role I’m in at Xenium I have the opportunity to work with lots of different employers. They’re all at a different phase in this process, but what I will tell you is that there are companies talking about culture right now. It’s a huge part of people practices and you could argue that it’s the first step. How do you write a job description for an employee if you don’t even know what you want your people to be and how they’re going to behave with one another? It’s easy to put down that you’re looking for someone to answer the phone and greet customers, but it goes deeper than that. The business I work with that have this stuff figured out and are integrating it or improving the way they’re integrating it see a better return on their investment. They spend less time turning over employees, they retain their people, their people are happy. When you go into the workplace, you can tell. It’s something you can feel. When everyone is aligned with a common vision, it’s something you can’t really put words around.
Brandon: It’s interesting that you mentioned job descriptions, because I hadn’t even really thought about that. But you see postings out there on LinkedIn or wherever you’re looking, and they’re all written the same way. It’s all about what does the job do, who we are as a company, blah blah blah. What people don’t tend to integrate, although you do see them every once in a while, is what their principles are and what they believe in. So that’s going to attract a certain person, and I think it’s more appealing, because right away if they got the job, day one, they’re going to expect that the whole organization acts this way. It’s because of the principles, everyone abides by the guiding principles of the organization.
For people listening, I’m sure some people have given thought to redoing this or, if they don’t have them in the first place, creating some principles; so where do they start?
Lacey: I think it probably starts where you said, with the purpose and trying to figure out what that is. That’s not actually how Xenium did it, and maybe there’s not a right way or a wrong way to start this, but I think really looking at what’s working in the organization right now and trying to identify, within your company, who you are and how you show up in the community. What would your customers say about you? What would the manager say about the employees who are contributing and are really high performers—not skillset wise, but in these behaviors? I think that’s a great place to start. If a client is working with Xenium, talk with their HR Business Partner about this. We’re having conversations like this all the time. It’s really something that is top of mind for business owners and senior leaders.
Brandon: Joy, anything from you as a member of the committee? Just overall, what was the experience like?
Joy: I think the part that’s really important is getting the employees involved. It shouldn’t be a document that’s written just by leadership. Employees don’t want to feel like, “Oh, these are the rules set by someone else.” I think part of what empowers us as employees to be able to look at this and say, “I don’t think so-and-so really held to this specific principle this this conversation with someone, and I’m going to call them on it and get some resolution, so I feel better about it.” Within Xenium, you can bring this to anyone at any level. We all know that this is our responsibility and how we’re going to treat each other. We’re going to call each other on it and have conversations about principles we want to work on with someone. I think allowing employees to be involved and have a say in what kind of place they want to work in and what kind of ideals they want to live by is great. You spend a lot more hours at work oftentimes than you do at home, so you might as well have that input from people who will be there all day.
Brandon: Well said. This has been an awesome conversation. For folks listening in, I’m going to link up to the “Xenium Promise” so you can download it and get an idea of what we’ve created and what it looks like.
Lacey Halpern and Joy McCormick, thank you both for being part of the podcast.
Lacey: Thank you!
Joy: Thanks for inviting us.