An organisations core values offer a public indication of the guiding principles, beliefs and values that should underpin everything that we can expect when engaging with that organisation.
How many organisations can actually deliver against these well intended (or cynically crafted) ideals?
Following the earlier article Core Values – Corporate Guiding Light or Corporate Spin?, this series takes a closer look at the core values of a variety of organisations – and shares a personal commentary and opinion on the same. Please do share your own opinions in the comments below!
Can you here that buzzing noise?
To start the series, I am looking at beBee.com – the hot new social media and blogging platform that has already made a huge buzz by bringing together people’s personal and professional lives into a single place – creating quite a hive of activity, attracting about 11 million users in it’s first 12-14 months.
Core values should guide the organisations vision, shape its culture and provide clarity on what it values. So what do beBee.com have to say for themselves?
What does beBee promise to deliver?
beBee defines itself as “the social network where your personal and professional lives come together” and invites you to”Connect with users that share your interests around the world, find content that is truly relevant to you and thousands of opportunities.” beBee will also apparently “help you to get opportunities and new experiences connected with people similar to you.”
beBee is a network for maximum affinity between users, specialized by sectors, which allows you to connect and share experiences, skills and opportunities with others related to your interests.
Does the beBee experience live up to the promise?
When beBee says it brings my personal and professional lives together, what it is really saying is – as a user, why should you have partition yourself into two personas on two different websites in order to show and express your business life (for example on LinkedIn) and your personal life (for example, on Facebook).
We are one whole person – we should be able to mix our work and play as we feel appropriate. beBee provides for and positively encourages users to buzz and blog for both business and for pleasure.
If I want to write about creating Customer Centric businesses, I can (and do!) – if I just heard a classic tune from the 70’s / 80’s whilst writing up a document and want to share it with my followers, I can (and do!).
I am a consultant, I am a Yoga Teacher, I am a salesman, I am a yachtsman, I am a director, I am a karaoke singer, I am a strategist, I am a saxophonist, I am a Programme Director, I am an aviator in training – I am a busy bee!
And beBee enables me to express each one of these things on my terms, when I want. I can find hives of similarly inclined, like-minded folks to share and discuss all of my interests – and not be frowned upon for discussing ‘trivia’ in the ‘hallowed’ halls of business.
beBee is indeed enabling me to connect with the folks that I want to – in an organic, natural way.
Are beBee operating to their values – are they up to snuff?
What are the beBee values?
Affinity Networking
Affinity NetworkingMaximum affiliation among users who share the same tastes, interests and personal and professional experiences
beBee is living and breathing this core value – delivering relevant content based upon my actions – allowing me to fine tune content down to individual articles, buzzes and even comments from other users!
Enable Growth
Businesses, users and entrepreneurs have the opportunity to achieve their targets successfully.
Hmmm, this is is a bit harder to quantify.
I have not been active long enough on beBee.com to have set specific targets and measures – or started actively monitoring my activity against results.
My exploration and experimentation in blogging and networking at beBee are however delivering unexpectedly good results in the Hive Rankings. Time will tell how reliable an measure of “success” these Rankings are – or whether they become subject to ‘gaming the system’ – as some no doubt some already are.
I am also happy with the steady growth of the size of my network (number of followers), though I feel I still need to fine tune my approach to maximise effective use of my time.
So – overall, I can honestly say am meeting my short term aims of establishing a credible presence on beBee.com.
Empowering Relationships
We promote unity, connection and collaboration between users because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Whilst exploring the capabilities and networking with other users on the website (from many industries, countries and professions) – from front-line workers to CEOs – I have successfully made what I hope to be strong, long term connections that seem to span the business and personal aspects of my life.
Additionally, as an early “Producer of honey” / “Producer” / “Author” / “Blogger” (or whatever name beBee settles on), I am very happy with the level of engagement I have received from other users – FAR GREATER than that I experienced on LinkedIn.
Time will tell whether the benefit of early adoption (being one of the first 25-30 or so bloggers at beBee.com prior to the Beta launch of its new blogging platform to the whole user base on the 11th April 2016) will pay longer-term dividends, or whether the “hive-mind” will equalise things over time.
Therefore, so far – I feel that my relationships are well and truly empowered!
Transparency
We seek to share and exchange information among people to whom it is actually relevant, perpetuating on trust and respect.
This value talks to much of what I said before about my experience to date with beBee.com and its user base.
Further, I am extremely impressed with the transparency, openness and commitment to personally engage with users demonstrated by the beBee.com management / executive team (including the CEO, Javier Cámara Rica – thanks for your support) – on a daily basis.
As beBee.com grows, it will be interesting to see how long and how much the team can remain engaged with users on a daily basis. I have a funny feeling that the beBee team may just be able to continue living and breathing their core values, despite the inevitable growth they are going to continue to go through.
What has your experience of the beBee core values been? Which organisation would you like to explore the core values of next?
