If you’ve worked with Advantage Group International, you’re likely familiar with our passion for healthy partnerships.
A strong partnership starts when two parties take time to prioritize shared interests, align their goals and identify opportunities to grow together. With this foundation in place, each partner will eventually strive to overdeliver, provide superior service and meet the other’s needs with unparalleled efficiency—resulting in strong, mutually-beneficial business relationships.
While this core belief is central to our service offering—and is typically used to help our clients yield better results from their business partners and beyond—we also believe it holds tremendous value in building strong company cultures.
In fact, we recently applied this proven formula to update our own organizational values—a step we believe is central to strengthening our own internal partnerships, and providing exemplary customer service.
Here, we’ll explain how we adapted our proven process to establish an inclusive set of organizational values—and how we believe this step, and these new values, will enhance the client experience moving forward.
The Process
Heading into our value revamp, it was really important for us to create values that represented our organization as a whole. To achieve these results, our values couldn’t be created in a leadership silo. Rather, we needed to solicit feedback from each member of our global business.
Just as we use the Advantage Report to transform data and partner perspectives into helpful insight for our clients, our internal journey began with a company-wide survey, which gave employees an opportunity to weigh in on our existing values.
Through this exercise, our leadership team learned that employees wanted our corporate values to be visible and meaningful—and integrated in ways that would foster true accountability, transparency, professionalism, collaboration, and inclusion throughout all facets of the organization.
With that solid starting point, our leaders and board members were able to brainstorm ways to transform that feedback into a set of values that would resonate with everyone. After a number of months, our leadership team landed on four key values we believe represent the people of Advantage—and the company we strive to be.
Our Values
At Advantage Group International, we:
Are engaged, on the team and in the game
Ensure everyone has a voice. Be in the game, not on the sidelines. Bring energy and enthusiasm. Seek mutual benefits. Trust your team.
Give and receive empathetic feedback
Provide constructive feedback and pose creative solutions. Be open to receiving feedback knowing that it will lead to outstanding results.
Succeed with a high-performance attitude
Champion customers through exceptional work. Your contribution to the business matters. Own your role. Take calculated risks.
Seek to improve and find a better way
You are your biggest competition. Always seek to improve. Push the threshold of what defines best in class. Elevate constantly.
Next Steps
Articulating a strong set of values was only the first phase of our culture journey. As we move forward, we plan to further utilize the data and insights from our employee survey to embed these values into our corporate culture.
To start, we’ll take steps to provide our team members with the support they need to achieve their value-led goals—through things like additional training, overhauling our recruitment and retention efforts, and opportunities to recognize individuals who are living our values. From there, we’ll continue to solicit feedback from our team and engage them in our value-led cultural evolution.
Based on our experience with clients, we’re confident this approach will further strengthen our relationship with our internal partners—which, in turn, will elevate the client experience. By engaging with our team members—and taking steps to truly listen to, and understand, their interests—our goal is to create a working environment where people are driven to uncover new possibilities, work efficiently, offer value-added support and seek out new ways to offer a truly stellar customer experience. To learn more about our values and company culture in action, visit our People page
