Just about every company these days has a mission, vision, and set of core values. But all too often, these documents are reviewed once a year by leadership then filed back away in a drawer. In these cases, they remain hollow ideals rather than a reality of life at the company. Sometimes this happens because the company followed the trend without really knowing what it meant. Other times, businesses want to live their values, they just don’t know how to realize their values in their business goals and day-to-day operations.
Through our role as HR and benefits consultants, we’ve gotten to know hundreds of companies over the years who struggle with this exact challenge. And we’ve had the chance to guide them through the process of integrating their values into everything that they do, particularly by crafting values-driven benefits packages and human resources processes.
We’ve seen what works, and we’ve also seen what doesn’t. And we have also seen how businesses transform and grow when they start realizing their values in their day-to-day work.
This is one of the best things about being part of the Launchways team. We’ve taken the lessons we’ve learned from working with our clients to heart and live our values every day, in every way.
Our values shape who we are as team members, collaborators, and consultants. They fuel our personal growth and make us invested in the success of our coworkers, our company, and our clients. And we get the chance to help our clients live their values and build more productive, engaging, and rewarding workplaces.
Let’s take a look at what it means to live our values at Launchways, including:
- The Launchways Core Values
- How We Make Our Values a Reality of Life at Launchways
- Values-Driven Customer Relationships
- Helping Our Clients Live Their Values
Launchways’ Core Values
Before we dive into how we live our values, here’s a quick overview of what our values are, as described by CEO Jim Taylor:
Resourceful
We are a resourceful organization. We take initiative, we own the challenges that are set before us, and we embrace the work of finding solutions, no matter what it takes.
We are a driven enterprise. We’re passionate about what we do, and we strive to always go above-and-beyond for our clients and each other.
Change-Maker
We’re a disruptive business. We’re unafraid to do things differently, especially when we think it can yield better results. We’re confident in our ability to improve the industry.
We’re a reflective and honest brand. We value constructive conversation and believe that differences of opinion can make conversations and businesses stronger.
We’re a community-minded team. We’re always looking for new ways to support members of our Launchways community while also engaging with the greater Chicago community.
How We Make Our Values a Reality of Life at Launchways
A values-driven workplace starts from the bottom-up. No amount of cajoling from the C-Suite can make a company’s values a reality. Every employee has to buy into the values and make them an intentional part of how they interact with their work, their coworkers, and their clients. Only then will a company’s values become a driving force in the company culture.
That said, there is a lot that a company’s leadership can do to get employees to take ownership of company values. Unsurprisingly, with over fifteen years of experience consulting with thousands of businesses, Jim knows a thing or two about how to build a values-driven organization. And he built Launchways around our core values from the ground up. Every process is shaped with the company’s values in mind – how and who we hire, how we run our meetings and share feedback, how we talk to each other across every level of the Launchways team, and how we are encouraged to grow and advance within the company.
And it’s worked. Our values are an integral part of what we do and how we do it. They help us treat each other with honesty and integrity, encouraging us to be our best and most authentic selves, to genuinely care about our fellow team members, and to be deeply invested in our clients’ successes.
It makes all the difference in the world to go into the office every day and work alongside friends and peers towards common goals with a shared vision, mutual respect, and open communication.
Values-Driven Customer Relationships
At Launchways, we know that we do best when our customers thrive. And our values define every aspect of our relationships with our customers. We become an extension of our clients’ teams, as invested in their success as we are in our own.
One of the main expressions of our values-driven approach to our client relations is our consultative sales model. Essentially, we provide our clients with solutions rather than products. We never go into a client relationship with the plan to “sell them” on specific products. Instead, we identify their needs first and then find the HR technology, benefits, and business insurance solutions that meet those needs and that help our clients accomplish their business goals.
At Launchways, “out-of-the-box” packages are out of the question, and it would be anathema to us to suggest that a client adopt a product if it isn’t the absolute best solution for their business.
This approach doesn’t just deliver better results for our clients, it also makes our work a lot more rewarding and engaging. We approach each new client with a fresh perspective, using our skills and experience to develop unique solutions and solve their specific challenges.
In short, we get to be strategic problem-solvers rather than succumbing to the uncaring monotony of the hard-sell.
Helping Our Clients Live Their Values
A significant part of living your values is making sure that the way you treat your employees aligns with your company’s core values. That means that your benefits and human resources processes need to be aligned with those values.
In our role as benefits and HR consultants, we get to help our clients align their people-processes with their values. For example, we’ve helped companies who value employee safety overhaul their workplace safety practices and we’ve helped companies who value diversity and inclusion implement more inclusive benefits packages.
Even after we’ve implemented the initial values-oriented solutions, we continue to help our clients live their values over the long run. Because we deliver scalable solutions, we build long-term relationships with our clients. Our clients regularly turn to us as they face different business or human resources challenges, and we guide them towards the strategies and solutions that will keep them faithful to their core values.
This is a unique aspect of our client problem-solving that goes beyond reducing their costs, expanding their benefits, or streamlining their processes. We don’t just get to help our clients succeed – we empower them to make sure their employees succeed as well.
Key Takeaways
If there’s anything we’ve learned from our years of guiding businesses through the process of maximizing their human potential, it’s the importance of company values. That is why we live our values in every aspect of how we work and do business at Launchways. Here’s what living our values looks like at Launchways:
- Putting our values at the center of everything we do
- Developing relationships with our coworkers and clients that are based on trust and honesty
- Delivering meaningful solutions for our clients through a consultative sales process
- Helping our clients live their values by aligning their benefits and HR processes with their company values