Core Values
About a year ago, we ran an article about our Trust Accelerators. We had identified nine (9) behaviors that, if practiced with each other, would accelerate trust within our working teams. Our list included Patience; Honesty without paying a price; Grace; Be Direct; Assume the Best; Keep your commitments; No meetings after the meeting; Deliver the mail to the right address; and Confidentiality. We added one more as suggested by Jacob—Be Present Mentally. After developing this list and adding some context to each item, we’ve rolled this out to all new team members, sharing the history and the importance of committing to these behaviors, and in addition, holding each other accountable when they’re missing. It’s a tall order that has truly helped our teams with their communication and levels of trust.
Looking even further back in time, we worked through choosing our Core Values. These personify who Syscon is and how we look at the work we do on behalf of our clients, with each other, and as we take care of our own house! All new employees receive a small picture frame that includes these six (6) values. They’re on our website, too. And each mid-year and annual State of the Company meeting, we remind each other of the list. For all team member reviews, we use the ‘Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it’ format from Traction and we have added columns for each of our six values. This has been a great tool for discussion and SMART goal setting.
Integrity Matters—At the business level, we work with our clients to help them run their businesses efficiently using technology. How and what we recommend has to start with integrity; honest assessments with viable solutions. Engaging with each other, our vendors, as well as our desire to have a successful company requires integrity at all times.
Take Care of Each Other—We all belong to a team and the teams make up the larger company. Having kind and caring people is important. As a full remote company, we don’t have a chance to pop into each others’ offices to stay connected and check in with each other. We are very intentional in our daily stand-ups, company shout-outs, special occasions, listening for what’s going on and what we need, both within our roles at Syscon as well as in our personal lives. We’re certainly not inserting ourselves, but it is important to take care, and to do that, we need to know who we’re working with and what’s going on!
Small Details are Huge—This one is tough, but there’s no escape! If one letter is wrong when setting up a new user, it doesn’t matter that all the other steps are perfect. If there’s an extra comma in the code, the program doesn’t run. Missing a step or a small detail is huge in our world. It’s a tough bar for us to reach, but it’s the nature of our work.
All Roles are Critical—Many years ago, we had a network tech who commented to me that he wished he had our marketing position so he could just sit there all day. I was shocked! Marketing does a ton of work and might have felt the tech was just sitting there taking calls! Every role at Syscon is important, supporting our service offerings, each other, our clients, and even our vendors. If someone doesn’t know what another person does, we recommend they get curious, ask questions, and learn how that role supports the rest of the company.
Think Like a Customer—As problem solvers, it’s easy for us to get absorbed in the problem itself and forget to provide updates to our client! Sometimes, we might need to offer a different solution that’s more cost-effective. Our clients want and need acknowledgement of the request, updates during the work, recommendations, and options.
Be Quick, but Don’t Hurry—When our clients need help, they need the solution or resolution right away! We need to be quick to respond and do our best to dig in quickly, but it’s very important we don’t hurry through the work. We strive to make sure we understand the core request, gather the accurate details, work through the problem, then test to be sure it’s fully resolved.
That’s it! Bringing our conversations back to these values has helped us stay focused. Whether it’s a new product or service, a team member, or a vendor, we can filter the discussion through these values. –CMW