News

At Chorus, we have always had a strong sense of who we are, why we do what we do and how we do it – however we haven’t had this written down. As we’ve continued to grow, we realised that having a strong company culture is important to us to ensure that we remain a strong team even while expanding so that we retain the feeling of being a small and tightly knit company. To foster this sense of company culture or ‘personality’ we decided that we needed to officially create and launch our company values.

How did we create our values?

We didn’t want to create and impose values we idolised, or thought would impress. Instead, we wanted our values to be truthful to who we are and have always been. To do this we needed to listen to our people to discover exactly what it is that forms our shared sense of purpose and values.

We started by running small workshops with staff members mixed into different groups that covered all areas of our business – from junior to senior roles and from highly technical to non-technical team members. In these workshops we asked everyone a selection of questions about Chorus and had everyone write the first word that came into their head on post-it notes – the more impulsive the better.

After running a few sessions, we had a large stack of post-it notes and quickly realised that the same words, meanings and sentiments kept coming up again and again. We took these and grouped the post-its with similar concepts together and realised that we had four piles – and had found our four core values.

We always knew that we wanted to break away from the norm and avoid having one-word values that we’d seen everywhere else, such as ‘Integrity’ or ‘Teamwork’, so we took all the words and played with phrases to create our four key values. We’ve created the following video to show our process – revealing the words and phrases from our workshops and the variations we created and experimented with, before revealing our final result.

Our Values

Our four values that embody who we are, what we believe in and what connects our team together are:

• Stay curious
  Technology is rapidly changing, and we thrive by being curious and staying ahead of the curve.
• Embrace the future
  We’re not afraid of evolving and welcome the exciting possibilities that come with working in such a fast-paced industry.
• Champion the truth
  We only advise on what we believe in and will always try to find the best approach; our clients’ success, is our success.
• Enjoy the journey
  Working hard and delivering great results is our priority, but we want to make sure that its enjoyable along the way for our staff, clients and partners.

Launching and living by our values

We launched our core values internally with a celebration week, bringing everyone at Chorus together. By giving the values a full week of focus we were able to really celebrate the new values, have ongoing discussions and give them the time they deserved to be launched to then settle into every day use. Our launch week looked like:

• Monday – Launching all the values with a company-wide celebration that brought everyone together to hear the final values for the first time. We had cake, free pens, mugs and merchandise with the values for everyone and went live with the values around our offices.
• Tuesday – Focused on ‘Stay Curious’, we hosted Lunch & Learn sessions about exciting topics in the industry and highlighting places for further learning and development to pique curiousity and spark interest.
• Wednesday – With the theme of ‘Embrace the Future’ we held townhalls sharing our vision for Chorus and our plans and goals for where we want to go in the future.
• Thursday – Looking at ‘Champion the Turth’, we focused on staff shout-outs and celebrations, launching our employee recognition portal where staff can share feedback and praise, giving each other points that can be converted into cash, vouchers and gifts.
• Friday – Ending the week on ‘Enjoy the Journey’ with a big social, pizza lunch, games and pool and table football tournaments in our staff room, giving us time together to relax and socialise and look back on the week.

Please note – since launching our values we’ve undergone a rebrand – but our values have stayed the same, they just look a little different!