Disclaimer: These communications are intended for the employees of HB Global. We recognize that the general public will have access. The views expressed in these communications represent Bob Whalen in the context of HB Global and may not apply to broader audiences.
Our mission, vision, and core values are foundational to our culture and strategy at HB Global. They are meant to shape our behaviors and decisions both on a daily basis and in the long run.
But people and situations are complex. We recognize that these cultural elements may not always provide sufficient clarity and detail to guide our decisions and direction. To account for this, we created the HB Global principles.
The HB Global principles are meant to supplement, not replace, our mission, vision, and core values. These principles provide greater detail and explanation and are meant to serve as a guide for how we approach our work and behaviors.
The principles are another tool in our toolbox to help scale our business and our culture.
Adding More Detail
Our mission, vision, and core values alone cannot capture sufficient detail to handle the complex situations we deal with. Our goal is that these cultural elements capture all that we are striving for. But we recognize that much of that is implied and not specifically stated.
The principles are created to spell out those details. These principles list out several pieces that are important to our culture and that we want to be present in the decisions we make and the strategy we take.
The principles are not designed to introduce new information. We’ve strived for each of the components of the principles to be present and a priority for our organization. But we can’t expect that if we don’t clarify those expectations. These principles help to do that.
Let’s look at an example. Safety is our highest priority at HB Global. Yet, it’s not listed in our core values, our mission, or our vision. It is, however, implied in each of those elements. Practicing safety aligns with each of our core values. A safe workplace leads to trust. Safe practices better position each team. Grit should be exercised with safety in mind. We can’t grow if we’re not being safe.
As it relates to our mission, creating a safe environment makes HB Global a great place to work, and implementing safe practices helps us to maintain the value we are creating.
Moving on to the vision, we can’t start with engaged employees if employees don’t feel safe. Not to mention, customers won’t be too happy if there are safety incidents on their jobs, and safety incidents eat away at financial success.
Safety is important to each element of our culture, but it’s only been implied within those elements. Safety is now a specific principle. While the rest of the principles are not listed in any specific order, safety is intentionally placed first. This principle reads:
Safety comes first in everything we do. The work we do is inherently dangerous, which is why safety is always our top priority. We acknowledge there is sometimes a cost to putting safety first, but if we don’t go home the same way we came into work that day, we’ve failed. Safety is not just the responsibility of our Safety Department but rather the responsibility of every employee owner throughout the organization.
This principle is a start in creating clarity around safety as a priority, roles and responsibilities related to safety, and the tradeoffs that may need to be made to ensure a safe environment.
These clearly stated details, now present in our principles, give all employee owners clear direction in what should be prioritized in decisions and strategy. It also gives us a common language to talk about this aspect of our work.
Giving Us a Common Language
This year, we’re focused on scaling our culture at HB Global. By scaling our culture, we can better ensure HB Global is a great place to work for existing employee owners, and we can be sure that we’re prepared for growth by being able to quickly integrate new employee owners. These principles are a crucial tool in doing that.
An important aspect of scaling culture is to have a common language that can be used throughout the organization. People, situations, and decisions are complex. We all operate in different ways and have different backgrounds and experiences. By establishing a common cultural language to use, we are better able to communicate with our teammates to reduce the chance of a misunderstanding and encourage meaningful conversations.
The principles help to enhance that common language. By providing additional details and clarity, all employee owners now have more ways to communicate throughout the organization.
Providing feedback is a great example of this. Not every employee owner will always be in agreement with the decisions that the leadership team makes. The expectations set forth in the principles give employee owners a language to use to share their thoughts with leadership about a given decision. For example, they may say they don’t believe a decision aligns with one of the principles. That’s a great way to open a conversation on common ground. The same can be true for other forms of feedback as well, such as performance reviews.
This common language is also incredibly valuable in explaining decisions. This is a way for our teams to be proactive in their communication. The principles give us a way to explain things like why a decision was made and how it can be implemented while opening the door for teams to use that common language to ask for clarity, give additional ideas, or provide feedback.
Creating Flexibility
Our mission, vision, and core values are designed to stand the test of time. They are part of our identity. If we constantly change these, we create chaos in our culture.
We also recognize the need for our business and people to be flexible. We live in a time of rapid change and need to be able to adapt accordingly. Our principles allow us the opportunity to introduce some flexibility based on the changing needs of our people, our company, and the environment we operate in.
While we don’t plan to constantly make wholesale changes to these, we can add, subtract, and edit these with more ease to ensure our employee owners have the clarity they need to be empowered to create value and make our company a great place to work.
This adaptability helps our teams to be flexible and better prepared as well. One of our goals at HB Global is for radical autonomy to be pushed throughout the organization. We want employee owners to be able to be creative in their work and make decisions appropriate for their scope and role. Having clear expectations and a common language better positions employee owners to be able to do this.
Have your own thoughts or questions about the HB Global principles? Send them to [email protected].