Success story

A Company More Than 100 Years Old Updates its Values and Expects Results

Measuring the Impact of Company Values

Industry: Food & Beverage/Restaurant

Key Challenges

A historically successful culture needed to be updated for modern competitive realities
The need to maintain a family-centric core and add financial rigor and accountability

Solution and Services

Update the company’s core values with focus groups and leadership participation
Develop a 360-based survey instrument to measure behaviors associated with the updated values

Solution Highlights

The solution provided timely, specific feedback to leaders so they understood how they were being perceived in reflecting the company’s values.
Managers and their direct reports had meaningful conversations about strengths and opportunities for development around corporate values.
Senior leaders gained perspective regarding how they were demonstrating the core values and what behaviors they may want to start, stop, or continue.
Senior Leadership developed a better understanding of each leader’s strengths and development areas for succession planning.

Key Benefits

Leadership discovered how they could contribute toward the desired culture and modeled these behaviors for all their team members.
Feedback conversations enabled leaders to leverage their strengths and develop new skills and behaviors that support the desired culture.

The White Castle organization maintains a strong and unique culture, and under the current leadership team, recently refreshed their corporate values and behaviors to support their business objectives and growth strategy. Focused on hiring talent externally and promoting from within, senior leaders wanted a way to measure the perception of these values-based behaviors that can be leveraged as development opportunities for their team members.

White Castle and Connect the Dots partnered to create a custom values-based 360 instrument and feedback delivery process to support this initiative. The Executive Committee participated as the pilot group, received feedback against the White Castle values, and approved the survey and feedback approach to be implemented across the organization.

The Challenge: Values Must Be More Than a Pretty Sign on the Wall

The challenge for White Castle was keeping the parts of their culture that made them unique and successful in the past while preparing for the future and the changing landscape of the competition and workforce demographics. Additionally, with the time, effort, and resources dedicated to updating their company values, the senior leadership wanted to ensure they had a method to measure the behaviors associated with each value and ensure that way there was a consistent and equitable way to measure perceptions of how the leaders and team members were “living” the values every day.

The Solution: Create an Assessment That Measures Values Behaviors and Provides an Opportunity to Share Feedback

White Castle Human Resources leaders engaged with Connect the Dots for our expertise in creating customized feedback tools for our clients. Together, we built an online 360-model assessment that identified behaviors associated with each updated White Castle value. Participants received aggregated data from key stakeholder groups and stand-alone data from their managers and saw their own self-assessment scores against the others. Results included quantitative and qualitative data for each value and open-ended questions to allow for additional feedback and examples for the participants.

Each feedback participant received a debrief conversation with a qualified HR consultant and then discussed the results and development plan with their manager to address any gaps.

The Results: Awareness Drives Leveraging Strengths and Development to Bridge Gaps

The response to this initiative was overwhelmingly positive, both from the participants in the feedback and the “raters” who provided it. The company’s investment in updating company values by creating the expectations of behaviors and their desired culture through the 360 survey showed its commitment to achieving the desired culture. The survey facilitated conversations that were critical for creating awareness of how leaders and other team members were perceived. The values were not just “on the wall” but were now a part of a daily, dynamic culture. The survey data also provided transparency that met the expectations of the younger workforce while staying true to the family-centric values that founded the company over 100 years ago.