Living Our Values: Shoreham Port Wins CIPD People Management Award

[By: Shoreham Port]

Last week we were delighted to be recognised at the annual CIPD People Management awards. We were successful in winning the national award for the Best SME people management initiative for our values led transformation.

Our journey began back in January 2020 when we refreshed our purpose, vision and masterplan. We had a solid strategy in place but identified an opportunity to improve how this was being delivered. We considered the relationships we wanted to create with our colleagues, stakeholders and customers and realised that a strong set of organisational values would be essential to our ongoing growth and development. We embarked on creating a set of values that defined how we wanted to operate, the behaviours that we were striving for - essentially how we wanted to conduct ourselves.

To create a set of meaningful values that not only embodied our current culture, but were also aspirational, helping to create the future we wanted, we embarked on a series of ‘values conversations’ across the Port. No stone was left unturned, and everyone had a voice in creating our new values. We were delighted to learn that the CIPD judges praised the way we approached the creation of our values and commented on how we really listened to the experiences of our colleagues on the ground.

Over several months we created a set of truly unique values. These went through many iterations, with the final set being a great fit for our culture. You can see our values on our website, including our visualisations, which were one of the innovative ways we embedded our values.

The CIPD judges said our values were easy to understand, relatable and spoke the language of our colleagues. They felt there was strong evidence, good process and rigour applied. We were delighted they recognised the quality time we had invested to ensure our values were right.

Feedback from the CIPD judges also revealed they were particularly pleased that the impact of our values was well measured, and data led, with not just HR metrics but instead strong evidence of real business change. This was against a backdrop of the global Covid-19 pandemic, increased market competition and Brexit. These conditions put the Port under considerable pressure and our colleagues showed immense resilience throughout, working tirelessly as key workers to keep trade flowing.