Company values are among the ways an organization sets and maintains its culture, becoming a key tool in everything from communicating employer brand to identifying high-potential future leaders. Yet often, values are created and delivered in a top-down way—an approach that foundational nutrition company Kate Farms intentionally sought to avoid when it set out to redefine its company values three years ago.

Leading up to the change, the organization had grown rapidly and become remote-first, with employees across the country, says Julia Slee, head of people and culture at Kate Farms.

“The values had originally been created by the founders and reflected the company at an earlier stage of its journey,” Slee says. “As we looked at who we had become and where we were headed, we wanted to ensure our values reflected the lived experience of today’s Kate Farmers, not just our history.”

From the start, the effort was one of “co-creation.” Leadership launched a companywide survey to gauge employee sentiment around existing values. Overwhelmingly, Slee says employees wanted to retain the “People with Heart” value, but also largely wanted to “refresh” the broader set of values.

“What happened next was one of the most inspiring parts of the process,” Slee says, recalling that an “an extraordinary number of employees” volunteered to participate in the process.

“People genuinely wanted a seat at the table,” Slee says. “That level of enthusiasm reinforced our belief that culture is most powerful when it’s not simply communicated to employees, but created with them.”

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Values and company culture, co-created

Employees joined working groups and participated in focus groups at “a level that exceeded our expectations,” Slee says. Leaders across the organization also took part in the effort, with “intentional checkpoints” that helped them “pressure-test” employee feedback, including conversations that lent authenticity and relevancy to the project and reflected what employees’ geniune experiences and what leaders envision for the organization.

“The role of leadership was not to dictate the outcome, but to participate alongside employees in shaping it,” Slee says.

Instead of handing down written values to the workforce, leadership and employees worked side by side to develop them, an exercise in true co-creation that helped bake trust and ownership into the process.

“Employees weren’t asked to simply review language that had already been written,” Slee says. “They helped identify what should stay, what should evolve and what values best reflected who Kate Farms had become.”

When the new value set was unveiled, employees could “see their fingerprints” on it—reflecting the difference between co-creation and just responding to employee feedback.

“That creates a level of ownership and credibility that’s very difficult to achieve through a traditional feedback process alone,” Slee says.

A foundation for the future

That spirit persisted in how the organization introduced the values, which happened in person and on stage at the 2024 Camp Kate Farms, a semi-annual all-company gathering. Instead of executives announcing the values, the employees who were involved in the project each shared a personal story about what the value meant to them and their work. The values include: People with Heart, Think Big, Work with Purpose, Make Each Other Better and Deliver Results.

When they were unveiled, the energy in the room was high, Slee says.

“People weren’t simply being introduced to a new set of values; they were seeing their colleagues, friends and teammates tell authentic stories about the culture they had helped create,” she says. “For me, that was a defining moment because it demonstrated that the values belonged to the organization, not to leadership or HR.”

The values—and the way in which they were developed—are now proving critical as the company integrates with Danone and brings on Nutricia as its partner company in Medical Nutrition. It launched a new company culture initiative called Our Culture, Co-Created in order to have employees help define cultural principles for the newly combined organization. Like the values project, it will involve employee listening sessions and an survey to determine what employees want to retain and what needs to evolve.

When organizations integrate, HR and leadership naturally focus on processes and structures. And while both matter, Slee says that co-created culture is just as important.

“What we’ve learned from our values journey is that culture isn’t something leadership can simply announce,” she says. “The strongest cultures are built with employees, not for employees.”

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