Values first: building our agency’s proposition

When Two Degrees Below came to life, as founding members, we agreed a key goal that would define how we operate as a business: to build the UK’s most values-led creative agency.

We know it’s a big ambition, and one we need to hold ourselves accountable to as we grow our agency, but what does it mean?

To us, striving to be the “most values-led” creative agency is a challenge to put the human experience front and centre of everything we do.

Our values show up in scenarios everywhere, and most significantly, in the ways we affect the people around us – from our clients to our peers, or the people we work alongside in the wider industry ecosystem we serve.

Right decisions, right outcomes

Getting our values right means being able to always deliver the most impactful outcomes. It means inspiring people to achieve the best business performance, which is a main driving force of our agency.

As a founding team we’ve enjoyed working together in previous agencies for many years and we knew determining our values needed to be a meaningful exercise. To get it right, we applied the same creative thinking and methodology we’d use when helping clients define their own purpose and values.

We took a four-step approach. This included:

Reaching out to clients, past and present, to understand what they thought our strongest qualities are – and what they’d like to see carried forward into our proposition.
Conducting a personal values assessment of each member forming the agency, to discover what mattered most to us individually and as a collective.
Aligning our values assessment and client feedback, to find the common themes in the behaviours we all believed in the most.
Creating a values charter, to underpin our client promise, and help us roadmap the journey to our ultimate goal – becoming the UK’s most values-led agency.

We covered and learnt a lot about one another. Our approach was rooted in behavioural psychological, and organisational strategy. We used the Barrett Model to find a central ground as individuals, and draw up a qualitative understanding about the personal values and needs we wanted to see in our business.

Revealing who we are

It was both humbling and rewarding to hear clients call out things like our level of skill, adaptability and understanding we exhibit in our engagements, and that we go the extra mile.

But it was also qualities more rooted in how we help people within organisations, that revealed who Two Degrees Below could be as an agency. One where our people help others shine within their organisations; where people ease the load for others across their day-to-day, or being super detail-oriented and leaving no stone unturned.

It was an exciting and unifying process recognising the strengths that would become the foundations we’ve built upon, and has helped us shape our values proposition (the who), our purpose (the what), and our client promise (the how).

The output from this process were three key values we feel proud to be accountable for in everything we do:

Immerse ourselves

We care like family. We build trust by making it personal. We listen hard so that we can understand more. Each of us brings our all.

Keep pushing

We apply creativity with intelligence. We stretch ourselves – and our clients. We never settle for ‘good enough’. Together, we strive for better.

Remember why

We’re commercial with a conscience. We make a positive difference. We think happy teams create the best work. Results matter – and so do people.

“These go for how we feel about each other, the experience we create for everyone we work with, and the difference we want to make to the world around us. Directly, and through our clients.”

An important thing to remember is that while we’re at the start of our journey, it’s not one with a fixed destination or result (this is a core tenet of ‘adaptive change’ and is the guiding principle behind how we help businesses – learn more from our Strategy Director, Matt Ede).

Values shape our future

Creating a business led by values means making the right (sometimes tough) decisions now, for the future. These will inform how we decide to do business – or not – with certain companies, and shape the environment we create for ourselves – something incredibly important when we think about how we attract the best talent to Two Degrees Below.

These are things we care deeply about hearing, especially from our people and partners, as much as we do the people we work for and with.

Being known as people whose duty of care is regarded as highly as their standards, makes being on our ambitious journey with a potentially ever-changing destination, an exciting one.

Do you want to understand how we can turn your company into a values-first business? Get in touch.

When Two Degrees Below came to life, as founding members, we agreed a key goal that would define how we operate as a business: to build the UK’s most values-led creative agency.

We know it’s a big ambition, and one we need to hold ourselves accountable to as we grow our agency, but what does it mean?

To us, striving to be the “most values-led” creative agency is a challenge to put the human experience front and centre of everything we do.

Our values show up in scenarios everywhere, and most significantly, in the ways we affect the people around us – from our clients to our peers, or the people we work alongside in the wider industry ecosystem we serve.

Right decisions, right outcomes

Getting our values right means being able to always deliver the most impactful outcomes. It means inspiring people to achieve the best business performance, which is a main driving force of our agency.

As a founding team we’ve enjoyed working together in previous agencies for many years and we knew determining our values needed to be a meaningful exercise. To get it right, we applied the same creative thinking and methodology we’d use when helping clients define their own purpose and values.

We took a four-step approach. This included:

Reaching out to clients, past and present, to understand what they thought our strongest qualities are – and what they’d like to see carried forward into our proposition.
Conducting a personal values assessment of each member forming the agency, to discover what mattered most to us individually and as a collective.
Aligning our values assessment and client feedback, to find the common themes in the behaviours we all believed in the most.
Creating a values charter, to underpin our client promise, and help us roadmap the journey to our ultimate goal – becoming the UK’s most values-led agency.

We covered and learnt a lot about one another. Our approach was rooted in behavioural psychological, and organisational strategy. We used the Barrett Model to find a central ground as individuals, and draw up a qualitative understanding about the personal values and needs we wanted to see in our business.

Revealing who we are

It was both humbling and rewarding to hear clients call out things like our level of skill, adaptability and understanding we exhibit in our engagements, and that we go the extra mile.

But it was also qualities more rooted in how we help people within organisations, that revealed who Two Degrees Below could be as an agency. One where our people help others shine within their organisations; where people ease the load for others across their day-to-day, or being super detail-oriented and leaving no stone unturned.

It was an exciting and unifying process recognising the strengths that would become the foundations we’ve built upon, and has helped us shape our values proposition (the who), our purpose (the what), and our client promise (the how).

The output from this process were three key values we feel proud to be accountable for in everything we do:

Immerse ourselves

We care like family. We build trust by making it personal. We listen hard so that we can understand more. Each of us brings our all.

Keep pushing

We apply creativity with intelligence. We stretch ourselves – and our clients. We never settle for ‘good enough’. Together, we strive for better.

Remember why

We’re commercial with a conscience. We make a positive difference. We think happy teams create the best work. Results matter – and so do people.

“These go for how we feel about each other, the experience we create for everyone we work with, and the difference we want to make to the world around us. Directly, and through our clients.”

An important thing to remember is that while we’re at the start of our journey, it’s not one with a fixed destination or result (this is a core tenet of ‘adaptive change’ and is the guiding principle behind how we help businesses – learn more from our Strategy Director, Matt Ede).

Values shape our future

Creating a business led by values means making the right (sometimes tough) decisions now, for the future. These will inform how we decide to do business – or not – with certain companies, and shape the environment we create for ourselves – something incredibly important when we think about how we attract the best talent to Two Degrees Below.

These are things we care deeply about hearing, especially from our people and partners, as much as we do the people we work for and with.

Being known as people whose duty of care is regarded as highly as their standards, makes being on our ambitious journey with a potentially ever-changing destination, an exciting one.

Do you want to understand how we can turn your company into a values-first business? Get in touch.

When Two Degrees Below came to life, as founding members, we agreed a key goal that would define how we operate as a business: to build the UK’s most values-led creative agency.

We know it’s a big ambition, and one we need to hold ourselves accountable to as we grow our agency, but what does it mean?

To us, striving to be the “most values-led” creative agency is a challenge to put the human experience front and centre of everything we do.

Our values show up in scenarios everywhere, and most significantly, in the ways we affect the people around us – from our clients to our peers, or the people we work alongside in the wider industry ecosystem we serve.

Right decisions, right outcomes

Getting our values right means being able to always deliver the most impactful outcomes. It means inspiring people to achieve the best business performance, which is a main driving force of our agency.

As a founding team we’ve enjoyed working together in previous agencies for many years and we knew determining our values needed to be a meaningful exercise. To get it right, we applied the same creative thinking and methodology we’d use when helping clients define their own purpose and values.

We took a four-step approach. This included:

Reaching out to clients, past and present, to understand what they thought our strongest qualities are – and what they’d like to see carried forward into our proposition.
Conducting a personal values assessment of each member forming the agency, to discover what mattered most to us individually and as a collective.
Aligning our values assessment and client feedback, to find the common themes in the behaviours we all believed in the most.
Creating a values charter, to underpin our client promise, and help us roadmap the journey to our ultimate goal – becoming the UK’s most values-led agency.

We covered and learnt a lot about one another. Our approach was rooted in behavioural psychological, and organisational strategy. We used the Barrett Model to find a central ground as individuals, and draw up a qualitative understanding about the personal values and needs we wanted to see in our business.

Revealing who we are

It was both humbling and rewarding to hear clients call out things like our level of skill, adaptability and understanding we exhibit in our engagements, and that we go the extra mile.

But it was also qualities more rooted in how we help people within organisations, that revealed who Two Degrees Below could be as an agency. One where our people help others shine within their organisations; where people ease the load for others across their day-to-day, or being super detail-oriented and leaving no stone unturned.

It was an exciting and unifying process recognising the strengths that would become the foundations we’ve built upon, and has helped us shape our values proposition (the who), our purpose (the what), and our client promise (the how).

The output from this process were three key values we feel proud to be accountable for in everything we do:

Immerse ourselves

We care like family. We build trust by making it personal. We listen hard so that we can understand more. Each of us brings our all.

Keep pushing

We apply creativity with intelligence. We stretch ourselves – and our clients. We never settle for ‘good enough’. Together, we strive for better.

Remember why

We’re commercial with a conscience. We make a positive difference. We think happy teams create the best work. Results matter – and so do people.

“These go for how we feel about each other, the experience we create for everyone we work with, and the difference we want to make to the world around us. Directly, and through our clients.”

An important thing to remember is that while we’re at the start of our journey, it’s not one with a fixed destination or result (this is a core tenet of ‘adaptive change’ and is the guiding principle behind how we help businesses – learn more from our Strategy Director, Matt Ede).

Values shape our future

Creating a business led by values means making the right (sometimes tough) decisions now, for the future. These will inform how we decide to do business – or not – with certain companies, and shape the environment we create for ourselves – something incredibly important when we think about how we attract the best talent to Two Degrees Below.

These are things we care deeply about hearing, especially from our people and partners, as much as we do the people we work for and with.

Being known as people whose duty of care is regarded as highly as their standards, makes being on our ambitious journey with a potentially ever-changing destination, an exciting one.