What Do Values Mean For A Team?

What are Brand Values?

Are brand values important or just another concept for corporations and businesses to look legitimate? 

Well, a lot of different companies in diverse industries have brand values. These values are a core element in brand books, often seen around the office to instill a reminder, and often brought up in keynote speeches. The idea of a business holding values is a little odd from an outside viewpoint – how can something that isn’t technically alive have a belief system? 

Similar to how a corporation can be tried independently of any actual employee, businesses can take on their own personality. The business is what you interact with in your day-to-day. This public-facing personality is the culmination of the values brought into core messaging and advertising. So in short, yes. Brand values are very important to a business. They help you find what matters the most about your operation.

At TM, we have been taking a hard look at who we are and what we stand for. We want to share what our agency’s values are and what they mean to us!

Passion

As we touched on in our We’re Seeing Red post, passion is an extreme form of emotion – something that drives you. Our employees are all so passionate about the web and the possibilities that come with it. It’s this passion that always pushes us to innovate and improve, keeps us working harder, and continues our growth as a team.

Collaboration

The web is diverse. We have a few teams covering different segments of it, and it’s very important that all teams get along well! Our team takes pride in our ability to work best together, rather than individuals with their own interests that are driving them. From the actual development of sites and design to writing the content and marketing efforts, there are a lot of moving pieces in our business. We show up by making sure communication and work efficiencies are in place for our team to deliver their best work.

Empathy

There’s a big difference between empathy and sympathy. Where sympathy is great, it’s not as internalized as empathy, which means you feel for someone because you know how they feel. We try to always be empathetic with both our team and clients. This includes when a team member’s doctor’s appointment runs over, which makes them late for work. Or if a client’s site is experiencing sites outside of what’s covered within their monthly maintenance. We understand both scenarios, and we do our best to accommodate and help out when and where we can.

TM’s Brand Values

Integrity

Integrity is sometimes hard to define. Sometimes it can be honestly, other times it can be keeping to what you promised or sticking up for another person. We believe it’s all mentioned above and also holding your core beliefs and never wavering. We have a lot of integrity here at TM; whether that’s in our client relationships, the work we produce, or how we treat each other within our workplace. Integrity drives us to always be the best we can be while supporting each other and being transparent about any issues that may arise.

Creativity

As a graphic designer, this is the value I hold close to my heart. Creativity pushes through every facet of our business, not just in the design department. We have a team of creatives who enjoy continuous learning to improve their craft, whether that’s one of our devs learning new animations or our marketing team taking the initiative to learn the Adobe Creative Cloud. We encourage creativity and love to see the results!

Value

Now the word, value, may seem odd to have as a core value, seems like a given, but there’s so much more to it! When we say value, we talk about it in a few ways: 

Our personal value

We talk about our personal value as our self-worth, the vivacity of our personalities, the skills & knowledge we have individually, and what we bring to the team. This self-worth and confidence build creativity and ideas to help us perform for each of our clients and the agency itself. 

Our value as a team

Additionally, we take our personal value, then look at it from a team standpoint. It’s the culmination of all those individual skills that give us the ability to do anything in a team setting. We value that immensely! 

The value of the products and services for our clients

Lastly, personal and team value is transferred to the work we produce for our clients. Given the care and our skills, our team always strives to do the best job we can, provide feedback and ideas when necessary, and go above and beyond to meet our clients’ expectations.