Hero group

Vlad Bog

In a world that moves and changes at an increasingly rapid pace people tend to lose orientation. What used to be certainties become uncertainties and the ground becomes moving sands. In such times anchors and landmarks are more important than ever. They provide orientation, direction, and confidence.

Values can act as such anchor. People who are aware of their own values are less reactive and more in control. Companies who are aware of and stand for their values are more genuine, transparent, reliable, and profitable.

 The Hero Group, a global company engaged in conserving the goodness of nature in food and bringing it to its consumers of all ages, has its origins in Switzerland in 1886. Since then, it grew internationally, successfully navigated two world wars and multiple economic crises while delivering a healthy and steady growth. And yet, the values that had brought us here did not seem to be future proof enough nor differentiating enough. So, the Group leadership has mandated HR to conduct a values re-design.

"We wanted the new set of values to reflect our current culture and the desired culture, to reflect the energy of all employees, to engage the minds and hearts and to be able to evolve in time."

With a transforming workforce that brings higher expectations of connection to company’s purpose and values and of involvement in the company design, it was evident that the entire organization needed to be involved.

As the “why” was clear, the next question to answer was: “What is our approach to evolving the values”. The answer came from our selected external consultant, a London based boutique consultancy firm named Purposeful Change who, based on their decades long experience we involve people at all levels in the evolution of our values. We invited just over 25 percent of the organization to participate, via online surveys, group interviews and individual interviews. We secured a maximum representation by going as wide and as deep as possible and including people from the shop floor to the company owners.

We have built a very diverse and capable core team coming from all corners of the business. We have spent considerable amounts of time together defining our aspirations from this project and how we could best achieve them. We discovered that, while it is good to have a plan and objectives to reach, we were a lot more effective going with the flow and re-shaping our team constantly according to the short-term deliverables, personal preferences, and level of influence in the organization required at different stages of the project.

The next challenge was processing the thousands of inputs, dozens of thousands of words, expressions, stories, feelings recorded from the interviews and translating them into not just a few values. Barrett’s Values Centre provided the necessary tools and Purposeful Change gave us the methodology that helped us explore the areas of alignment as well as the tension points amongst employee personal values, current company values and desired values.

We wanted the new set of values to reflect our current culture and the desired culture, to reflect the energy of all employees, to engage the minds and hearts and to be able to evolve in time. So the new values, four in number, contain an intriguing statement then, a next level of detail which describes what the respective value “is about”, then a more detailed description of the value, more like a story in one phrase and finally a last level of detail which is the positive behaviours displayed by a person fully living that value.

The New Values were first introduced at the annual global leadership meeting so that the leadership of the organization is one step ahead and can start demonstrating and driving the new values.

For the activation, as the values have been developed by the entire organization, we also wanted them to be activated by the employees. Local activation teams have been formed in all countries and while sharing a set of common objectives (such as the dates of replacing all values visuals), the local teams had full flexibility in choosing their approaches. Centrally we organized platforms for exchanging local experience and best practice.

As the new values are now taken back to the employees who have created them, people find familiarity in them but also an aspirational element, confirming that the work delivered the expected results.

Moving into 2022, we don’t see this as a project that is finite in time. The platform created by the local values activation teams secures the beginning of a structured dialogue of how things are done in the Hero Group of Companies. By doing that, the “story” of each of the values keeps evolving and so does the meaning, allowing them to change naturally. This platform of discussing “the how” expands into a platform of addressing issues together and stepping into the future together, engaged and purposefully.