Business Values | Hour Hands Case Study

Hour Hands

Values: Creating a flexible culture

Christine Frith founded Hour Hands in 2015 with the aim of creating a flexible working environment for herself and her team whilst taking on business and home admin tasks for her clients. Hour Hands is now a successful bookkeeping, business support and PA agency, with a growing team.

The challenge

With Hour Hands’ ethos centring around a flexible working environment, Christine approached Culture Chameleon to support her with creating clarity around this for her ever-expanding team. With the foundations for this lying in the business’ Values, we suggested that our Values discovery and definition process would be the best starting point.

What we did

Values and Values launch

Due to the size and close nature of the Hour Hands team, all team members were involved at all stages of the Values discovery and definition process. The process involved the team sharing examples of how they do things, the business’ story and exploring Hour Hands’ tone of voice and key differentiators.

It’s important to resist the tendency to gravitate towards a particular Values theme for the purpose of Values sounding punchy. However, during the discovery process, the ‘hands’ concept naturally stood out, without feeling shoehorned in any way.

Once we’d reached the final Values, and given that the full team had been involved throughout the process, we then supported Christine with deciding on an appropriate launch approach and designed all launch materials.

(Graphics: Dave Officer, Doodle Juice Design)

The feedback

Unsure of how exactly company Values would support us as a business, the team entered the process with Culture Chameleon with open minds. Culture Chameleon were brilliant at walking us through the concept of a Values framework. The days spent together brainstorming were eye opening, as they highlighted to the team how they were already living Values in their approach to work. The full team appreciated being involved with the development of the final Values. Culture Chameleon have enabled us to create Values that fit seamlessly into our working lives, whilst embodying our ethos and approach to work. Thank you, Laura and Caroline.

~ Christine Frith, Director, Hour Hands