Resilience, passion, integrity, and pace… are just a few of ours at MM Search, but it is not easy to say what your values are without some digging first.
Some may say that business values are the guiding principles that drive our behaviours, and others feel that they inspire action or future growth, but we know that at MM Search, our culture and values are at the beating heart of our organisation.
Our values inform how we work together, interact with clients, and support our candidates.
We strongly believe that values help us create the future we want to experience, and as a growing business hurtling toward our sixth year, we place a massive emphasis on our values – they will shape our future.
With this in mind, we wanted to drill down on the clarity of our values, what drives, develops, and deepens the connection that MM Search experiences daily and year-on-year. And as with many things, it is hard to do this in isolation. You often need support from others, so we invited the Chief People Officer of SMS Plc, Judy Keir, to put us through our paces and help us shape our values and understand our culture.
Judy started the workshop by brainstorming, placing photo cards on the floor and asking us to pick one or two that resonated with the MM Search culture. From this, everyone came up with an explanation about what working at MM Search felt like for them – examples included train tracks – being on the right track in your career, and pebbles of all shapes and sizes; we all bring something different to the team and work closely together, a toddler with toes in the sea – being able to experience things for the first time, dipping your toe into something new and exciting. From this, we then discussed our existing values. These were laid out on sheets of paper, and we all had to put a tick or a cross; the majority with ticks stayed, and crosses would go. New values were then voted on, based on language we had used to describe the culture earlier.
This was a fascinating exercise – ensuring the entire team were involved, helped us navigate and determine our values. We kept three original values – people specialists, passion, and pace, and we built on these.
Everyone left the workshop feeling so involved in creating the values, and on board with what they mean, which is really important especially since the team has grown substantially over the past few years.
It was also great to get Judy’s feedback; she thought we were a close-knit, collaborative team that communicated well, and that our competitiveness to achieve a goal shone through!
Onwards we go!
