Everyone can recite our values and nobody feels them. How do you activate values?
A value that is announced arrives already discounted. A value that a team has had to put into a line that scans, and then sing in front of colleagues, has been argued over, agreed and felt. Values activation is not a poster, a town hall or a screensaver. It is the moment a group has to decide, in its own words, what is actually true about how it works, and some things a company cannot say to itself.
The short answer. A value that is announced arrives already discounted. A value that a team has had to put into a line that scans, and then sing in front of colleagues, has been argued over, agreed and felt. Values activation is not a poster, a town hall or a screensaver. It is the moment a group has to decide, in its own words, what is actually true about how it works, and some things a company cannot say to itself.
- Its name in a budget line
- Culture and values activation. Living the values. Employer brand.
- The programme
- Paadi Munneram, Let us Sing. One day, seven working hours, on your own site. Built around your values, in your words.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
A message in a company's own voice, from its own people, in its own room, arrives already discounted. Everyone in the building knows who wrote the values, knows what they were written for, and has watched the gap between the poster and the Tuesday meeting for long enough to have stopped noticing it. Reciting them is easy precisely because they cost nothing to recite.
What is missing is not the words. It is the experience of the words being true. A value is felt at the moment a group has to decide, in public, what it actually believes about how it works, and that decision cannot be made by a communications team on the group's behalf. An outside voice and an unfamiliar room are not a luxury in that situation. They are the instrument, because some things a company cannot say to itself.
A platitude will not scan. The lyric makes the group agree on what is actually true.
What a session does about it.
The values are the brief. Before the day we gather, in your words, what each one is supposed to mean and where it is felt and where it is not. Then the team writes. A song about what integrity looks like on a bad Thursday has to be specific, because a lyric has to scan and a platitude will not, so the group is forced into the one negotiation the poster let it avoid: what is this value, here, in our work, in a sentence we would actually sing.
Rehearsal and performance do the rest. A value that a team has sung in front of the rest of the organisation is a value that team has publicly committed to, in a form nobody will forget by Monday. The recording is yours, and it tends to outlast the poster.
How you would know it worked.
Named behaviours tied to each value, agreed before the day and rated by managers or peers thirty to sixty days later. Not whether people can recite the value, which they already could, but whether they did the thing it names when it cost them something.
Psychological safety on the seven item scale, before and at thirty days, since a value cannot be lived in a room where nobody can say it is not being lived.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim to make a value true that leadership does not practise. A day in which a team sings about candour, followed by a month in which candour is punished, teaches the team something, and it is not the value.
This is not an employer brand campaign and we produce nothing for a careers page. What it produces is a team that has argued its values into a sentence and sung it.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
Kerala organisations bring this question in two forms: a set of values inherited from a parent company elsewhere that has never landed here, and a founder's values that the second hundred employees never met. Both are the same session. The words come from the people in the room, in English or Malayalam or both, which is usually the first time the values have been in the language people actually work in.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
Everyone can recite our values and nobody feels them. How do you activate values?
A value that is announced arrives already discounted. A value that a team has had to put into a line that scans, and then sing in front of colleagues, has been argued over, agreed and felt. Values activation is not a poster, a town hall or a screensaver. It is the moment a group has to decide, in its own words, what is actually true about how it works, and some things a company cannot say to itself.
Can we use our own values wording?
The session is built on it. We gather before the day what each value is supposed to mean and where it is felt and where it is not, and the songs are written to that brief. What comes out is your wording, argued into lines a team will actually sing.
Is this a culture workshop?
A culture workshop talks about culture. This has a team make something together in which the culture is audible, and then perform it to the rest of the organisation. Nobody is asked to discuss the values. They have to agree on them, because a lyric that is not true will not survive the first rehearsal.
What if our values are being rewritten?
Then this is a good moment. A day that produces, from the people who do the work, the sentences they would actually stand behind is better raw material for a rewrite than another survey, and it arrives already felt.
Some things a company cannot say to itself. An outside voice is the instrument.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.