Living and leading our values
Sian Basker (left) and Mads Spinks (right) are Co-Chief Executives at Data Orchard
As a social enterprise we consider ourselves a highly values-driven organisation. By values we mean the fundamental beliefs our team holds and the guiding principles that help us work better together towards our mission and vision. They present ‘what the company stands for’ and to a large extent influence the culture and behaviour of the organisation.
Our five values are: honesty, quality, collaboration, respect, openness.
It’s all about the people
ACEVO’s Leading with values report identifies ‘being values led’ as one of the three pillars that enable leaders to create a safe organisational culture – alongside ‘modelling ethical behaviour’ and ‘nurturing a culture of continuous improvement’.
“Values must be authentic, relevant to the work of the charity and resonate with the staff team. They should be the golden thread that runs through all decision making in the charity.” ACEVO
Our research on data in the nonprofit sector consistently shows that culture and leadership are the most important influencers of organisational data maturity. And culture is built on behaviour, language, values and beliefs. Ultimately, it’s all about the people.
So with this in mind, and as part of the process of writing the annual report for our board, we took a closer look at how our core values are reflected in Data Orchard’s work and relationships.
What does ‘living our values’ mean for us at Data Orchard?
We brought our team together to explore how we live by our values and asked ourselves three key questions:
When we’re working with others, how would they know these are our values?
What examples do we have of us living our values?
What could we do differently to practise our values in our work?
Here’s how the team responded:
Honesty
What we say: We believe in being truthful and fair. We can be trusted to provide integrity and objectivity. We take responsibility and keep our promises.
What we do: Staff agree our culture encourages open communication, honesty when we don’t know something and confidence to challenge each other in constructive ways. We own up to our mistakes. And we don’t take on work we can’t confidently do or that doesn’t align with our values.
Clients can take confidence from our transparent approach. We do what we say we will, stick to deadlines, and are honest when these can’t realistically be met. We are also honest when we can’t draw legitimate conclusions from the data we’re working with, or if there are tensions between what we’ve found and what the client would like us to say.
Quality
What we say: We bring together highly qualified, knowledgeable, and experienced people. We apply high standards of professionalism in our methodologies and approach. This ensures our work meets legal and ethical standards and is quality assured.
What we do: We recognise the high quality of each other’s work and support each other to improve the quality collectively. We have policies in place around legal and ethical standards, for example, personal data, confidentiality, professionalism, workplace standards. We have a growth mindset which means we often ask ourselves ‘what can I learn to make this better?’.
Our clients tell us we deliver high quality work. We are often hired based on word of mouth recommendations and our ‘Net Promoter Score’ is well above average for business and nonprofit sectors. We also ensure quality through the small things we do for clients that enhance our service, such as providing extra materials.
Collaboration
What we say: Teamwork, trust, cooperation, listening, and communication are key to the way we work with each other, with clients, and with other partners.
What we do: We include employees and associates’ ideas when planning work and developing new products and services. We recognise and draw on different strengths and skills and often share our learnings via regular ‘Tea n Learn’ sessions.
When we work with clients, we seek to engage them in the project as co-producers. We love to work in collaboration with partners and associates. A good example of this was developing DataBasicCymru+ last year alongside our partners Data Cymru and Service Works. The different perspectives each brought led to the production of a brilliant set of training materials.
We’re also encouraging collaboration, shared learning and peer support around data across the nonprofit sector through our community building, including our Nonprofit datafolk monthly workshops.
Respect
What we say: We show mutual respect and consideration for one another. We believe everyone has a right to have a voice. We work to ensure diverse backgrounds, ideas and opinions can be heard.
What we do: We show respect to each other and those we work with by listening, considering, and responding to input and feedback. We enable staff to work remotely and flexibly, trusting our team to manage their own time and choice of workspace. All our reports are co-authored to acknowledge contributors.
We co-produce with clients, respecting their position as experts in their own organisation. We advise our clients on how to incorporate diversity of opinions and voices when engaging staff and service users, or researching subjects in our work together. We also respect our clients enough to tell them when we don’t agree or if things are not working.
Openness
What we say: We believe that by being open and transparent we create a culture of trust and shared learning. We challenge ourselves and are open to being challenged by others. We are inquisitive and receptive to discussion, new ideas and ways of doing things.
What we do: Openness is woven into the way we work. Basecamp (our primary management and communication platform) is an inherently open space. Staff are able to see projects they are not directly working on, and clients are invited into the space to witness, and be involved in, our process.
We actively ask for input from our clients, often getting them to review documents before they are finished and always asking for their feedback at the end of a project. We are open about assessing our own work, for example through publishing the impact report of our Data Maturity Assessment Tool. We freely and openly share many resources, tools, and learning experiences online.
What could we do differently?
This exercise raised some interesting further questions. For example, what exactly does ‘quality’ mean and how do we balance different aspects such as the standard of work, the timeliness of delivery, and the budget available? Or how can we better balance ‘openness’ with ‘ownership’, for example around Intellectual Property and licensing?
Perhaps we could have ‘deeper’ definitions about what each value means practically for us (along the lines of the famous Government Design Principles)? Or would formalising values in this way detract from the instinctive behaviour of our team?
We’re continuing to think about these things. Overall, reflecting in this way has made us realise how deeply our values really are embedded into our everyday working practices. That makes us very proud of what we’ve achieved in developing a strong mission and culture at Data Orchard over the last decade.
Strengthening the muscle
Ultimately the more we talk about our values, the better we’ll become at articulating what living them really means, and how we can do it better.
We were inspired by the way that Janet Thorne (CEO of Reach Volunteering) talked about the #ChangeTheStory campaign, which highlights how people are intrinsically motivated by shared values such as kindness, solidarity and a sense of purpose.
“Culturally, we are not used to talking about compassionate values, so the language does not always come easy, and we tend to feel shy or awkward. But the more we practise, the more fluent we become; and as the philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, values are like muscles — they become stronger with use.”
In the coming year, we’ll continue to strive for positive communication and openness, working in the spirit of collaboration to produce high quality results, and keeping our values at the core of everything we do.