Our new company values weren’t written by one person and handed to the team afterwards. We brought everyone together away from the office to work through real examples from inside the firm, so the values reflected how Benson Wood works with clients and as a team.
Our values have always been important to the firm, but as the team has grown, it felt like the right time to revisit them. It's easy for a set of values to sound good on a website and have very little to do with how a firm behaves day to day. That was the trap we wanted to avoid.
Taking the conversation out of the office
To give the discussion the space it needed, we hired a local cinema and brought the whole team together for an afternoon away from the usual distractions.
Before the session, everyone was asked to think about what Benson Wood gets right, what we have learned when things have not gone to plan, and the words they would use to describe the firm. That kept the conversation focused on real examples.
It’s easy to say a firm is supportive, proactive or people focused. It means more when someone can point to a time they saw that happen, or when something went wrong and the firm changed because of it.
One of the strongest examples from the afternoon was about a box of Tunnock’s Teacakes.
Irene talked about the first box we sent to a contact. A few had been bashed in the post, and they shared a photo of the squashed box on LinkedIn. It had bothered Irene at the time because it wasn’t the experience she wanted them to have.
That was the kind of thing people brought into the conversation. Not just the things they were proud of, but the things they still thought about afterwards.
There’s always a risk that values workshops turn into nice words on a screen. This one stayed grounded in the things the team remembered and cared about. By the end of the afternoon, it felt like the team were describing Benson Wood back to us.
Building values that felt like Benson Wood
The final values were shaped by the themes that came out of those conversations. They reflect how the team already works and the kind of firm we want Benson Wood to keep being as it grows.
Own It is about taking responsibility. If we say we’ll do something, we do it. If something changes, we say so early.
Aim Higher is about looking for better ways to do things. Sometimes that means fixing a process that keeps causing problems. Sometimes it means taking more care over how we explain the figures, so clients can use them.
Win as ONE reflects the fact that nobody here works in isolation. Good client service depends on what happens inside the team, including the things a client may never see.
People First applies to colleagues as much as clients. Before we get into the numbers, we need to understand what is sitting behind the question.
And then there is Love Tunnock’s Teacakes!
That one usually gets a smile, but it fits us. They’ve become a bit of a Benson Wood thing over the last few months, and they’ve now made it into our values.
We take the work seriously, but we don’t want the experience of working with us to feel cold or overly formal. When clients come into our Bellshill office, we want it to feel like they’re being properly looked after, not just shown into a meeting room.
A decent coffee and a Tunnock’s Teacake help make the welcome feel a bit more like Benson Wood.
What our values mean in practice
The values came from real examples the team recognised, which makes them easier to come back to.
They come into the bigger decisions, like who joins the team and which client relationships feel like the right fit. They also show up in the everyday things that affect how the firm feels to work with.
That might mean calling someone back when they’re waiting on an answer or saying early when a job is taking longer than expected. It also means passing on information before the next person has to ask for it.
Inside the team, it shows up when someone has a lot on and someone else steps in. With clients, it means having straight conversations before something becomes harder to deal with.
That gives us a way to keep building the firm without losing the parts of Benson Wood that people already value.
Read more about each value and what it means in practice on our Values page.
