BYZ: Our new HEART Values
Values are the soul of an organisation. Good values, when manifested in how we act every day, help us create the future we want to experience in our day to day working life. We have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build an outstanding organisation – one that lives up to the ideals and aspirations of everyone who works here. And values are the compass and map that help us get to that destination.
Why Values Are Important: In our view, there are four reasons:
- Decision-making: Values assist in our day-to-day decision-making. This is applicable to both small decisions (e.g. “How do we run a meeting?”) to the most important ones (“How do we treat each other and our young people?”).
- Identity: Values educate the public & stakeholders about who we are and how we are different.
- Hiring and Promoting: Values guide our decisions about who to hire and who to promote. We are a team and those who live and work by our values are paramount to our culture.
- Unity: Values help us build internal unity and alignment.
How We Determined Our New Values: We had a set of values that we came up with through whole organisation engagement sessions. The process of determining our new values was bottom up. An executive team can’t prescribe values for the whole organisation. They should be a reflection of how we all act and behave. As such, we asked everyone to come up with the what they felt Blackburn Youth Zone was about and how we aspire to work in an offsite workshop as well as further engagement session held in the youth zone. We listened to everyone’s ideas and their own values and eventually came up with a list of five values that we believe to perfectly reflect who we are and what we value at BYZ. They are both real and aspirational in nature.
Our New HEART Values: Without further ado, here are our new values.
- HONESTY
- EXCELLENCE
- ACCOUNTABILITY
- RESPECT
- TEAMWORK
For each value, we outlined what we mean in greater detail. For example, “honesty” is a big word that any company may value. But for us, there are certain aspects that we value about being honest – like “We do what we say we do and follow up on actions.” This means we should trust each other without doubt to complete actions and tasks as well as stick to our word and complete actions to the best of our ability. See our infographic for more information on our core value detail.
If our values and the thought process behind our values resonates, drop us a line or check out our open positions here!
