Core Values as a Foundation of Employee Satisfaction
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Aug 14, 2009
Sixteen years ago today my only freelance customer and I decided that we should found a company to sell the
CAPI software application that I had developed for him. Looking up into the sky, where the annual meteor shower was underway, Rich suggested we name the company Perseides Software.
A day or two later, after both of us independently realized that no one we bounced the name off of knew how to spell Perseides, I suggested we call it Perseus instead, after the constellation in which the meteor showers appear. As Boston-based entrepreneurs, we loved Lotus Development Corp., and Rich suggested we name the company Perseus Development Corp.
Despite its astronomical eponym, Perseus did not have stellar growth initially. Rich and I had made the classic mistake of thinking there was a large market for a product that
we needed. In 1996, we extended the product (called Perseus IntelliWriter) to support web surveys, and then in 1997 we launched one of the first two applications dedicated to
web surveys, Perseus SurveySolutions for the Web. We grew dramatically from then on, making the Inc. 500 list twice and the Deloitte & Touche New England Fast 50 list four times.
Since Perseus grew at a time of record low unemployment, we often had difficulty hiring qualified staff. Some staff didn’t work out, as they would have done better in a large, stable business with more formal processes than we had. One of our clients automated an applicant assessment process to identify which types of jobs their applicants were most suited for, and that inspired me to come up with the Perseus core values. I agonized over every firing that I had done over the years, and I thought about each of them to come up with the following.
These are the values that have enabled us to build the leading company in our industry; these are the values that will fuel our worldwide growth in the coming years; and these are the values that will drive your career here:
- Professionalism – Demonstrating professional methods, character and standards. Treating prospects, clients and co-workers generously and charitably at all times, but especially in the face of adversity.
- Enthusiasm – Showing excitement, optimism and passion for your work.
- Resourcefulness – Acting effectively and imaginatively to produce great results from scarce resources.
- Self-directedness – Working independently and autonomously to achieve the goals set by management.
- Ethics – Acting in accordance with the accepted principles of right and wrong that govern the conduct of our profession.
- Unselfishness – Putting others before yourself, giving your time and effort for prospects, clients and co-workers. Showing cooperative effort as the member of a group to achieve a common goal.
- Strategic-mindedness – Suggesting and implementing long-term improvements springing from a sequence of short-term tasks.
OK, I probably worked too hard to have the core values spell Perseus! But it certainly made it easier for me to remember them when interviewing applicants.
Too often
employee satisfaction research overlooks the fact that to have truly satisfied employees you must hire the right types of people in the first place. The Perseus core values became a way for us to do this with much greater consistently. As you think about employee loyalty for your organization, consider profiling respondents by assessment questions, where they indicate where they fall on a continuum for each value (e.g., for self-directedness, from a continuum of "prefers close direction" to "prefers independence").
My partner and I sold our company to Austin Ventures in 2006, and AV purchased WebSurveyor and merged it with Perseus to form Vovici. (For the record, Vovici is neither a constellation nor a meteor shower!) While the Perseus name may no longer live on in the market, as a mnemonic for our coworker values it lives on each time I interview a new applicant for Vovici.