Can AI help embed organisational values?

Summary

• Many organisations set themselves apart with their values, and AI tools could help embed those values in daily behaviour
• AI tools can also analyse company content and data to tell the organisation what values are actually reflected in daily culture
• Tools can help reframe an organisation's strategy to better reflect their stated values, as these often get lost
• AI can also be used to ensure job descriptions and contracts clearly convey desired and expected values and behaviour
• While AI can't understand 'values' it can be a huge help to us in tweaking our strategies and cultures to better reflect them

This may seem counter intuitive, as ‘values’ are an inherently human concept, but AI tools give us the opportunity to rapidly evaluate our written organisational assets against stated values.

Many organisations define a set of values which seek to guide culture and act as a market differentiator, providing signals to potential employees, customers and suppliers. In reality these are often very separate to an organisation’s strategy, policies, governance structures, design principles, job descriptions and procedures. Can AI help us to better reflect our values in our ways of working?

Values versus behaviours

An effective way of ‘bringing the values to life’, and holding people to account for meeting them, is to discuss and agree the behaviours which demonstrate and uphold the values every day. ‘Customer Service’ and ‘Collaboration’ are two of the most common values selected, according to University of Oxford research. Taking each team or job role and asking ‘what does excellent customer service mean to us?’ or ‘how can we enable effective collaboration with colleagues, partners and suppliers?’ helps make somewhat abstract values into tangible, observable behaviours. 

The risk of being generic

If many organisations are selecting ‘customer service’ and ‘collaboration’, then are these values really acting as a differentiator, helping to attract the colleagues and clients we want, or actually guiding the day-to-day interactions of our teams?

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Many organisations allow their AI tool of choice access to masses of information, including shared drives, emails, messages and websites. An AI ‘values audit’ can look across all this information and interactions and tell us which values are actually reflected in how we are speaking to each other, and what we are prioritising. If we are able to minimise AI’s people pleasing tendencies, we may not like what it has to report!

Strategy and values

While these terms are often discussed together, in most organisations there is a disconnect between the two. Strategies are broken down into business plans and objectives, and perhaps even cascaded to team targets and individual objectives, but where is the direct traceability to values?

When budgets are tight, do our organisations still prioritise values, or do they become an optional luxury? AI can help us frame and phrase our strategic direction to reflect our values.

Values alignment analysis

Many business analysts and leaders are familiar with cost-benefit analysis. While this regularly includes both tangible and intangible elements, and may even consider strategic alignment, it does not often evaluate identified options for how well they align to the organisation’s values.

If we share our options analysis and cost-benefit analysis with AI tools, we can prompt it to evaluate for values alignment, leading to interesting insights.

Job descriptions and contracts

These form a key part of managing people’s expectations and contributions, and while they may list the organisational values, most organisations are missing the opportunity to really describe what is needed, and what alignment to the values looks like at different levels of seniority. While the values should apply to everyone in the organisation, how those values are demonstrated will be very different, depending on the context of the role. Example prompt:

‘Review this job description and identify where our organisational values of [values] are not clearly expressed or reinforced. Suggest improvements that would make it more values aligned.’
It can also be useful to be explicit about the negative — stating examples of behaviours and actions that are in conflict with your values.

Conclusion

Of course, to our AI tools, these are not values, but just words. There is a risk that AI makes us sound more aligned to our values than we actually are (values-washing). AI cannot make us more aligned to our values if we don’t act in line with them, but it can provide useful suggestions for how changes in language in some of our key documents, and small tweaks to our policies and procedures can lead to nudges towards embedding the values every day. This is a ‘values by design’ approach, and it can start small. Try it with one job description, and discuss the results with colleagues. 

About the author

Christina Lovelock is a digital leader, coach and author. She is active in the Business Analysis professional community and champions entry level roles. She is the author of the BCS books Careers in Tech, Data and Digital and Delivering Business Analysis: The BA Service Handbook.