The BYCS values: our secret weapon

At the heart of BYCS is a powerful mission: 50by30; half of all trips by bike by 2030. This is the goal that inspires us everyday. To help us achieve this mission, we are steered by the BYCS Organizational Values, three simple words that provide the architecture for our success. And we are sharing these with you so you can help us stay on track and hopefully be inspired to join us in our work.

Let’s start by answering the question ‘Why do we need values?’ For any organization, values are the glue that binds it together. They define the way it operates and how the world sees it.

They guide it and keep it on track. Moreover, they are fundamental for success – research by PwC found that companies with distinctive and aligned values are twice as successful with execution, and twice as likely to show higher profitability and growth. And this is essential for a social enterprise like BYCS as it means we can invest more profit into growing our non-profit programs, like the global Bicycle Mayor network, that have the potential to affect billions.

For values to be successful, it is important to get everyone’s buy-in. That’s why we got cross-company input during World Values Day late last year. From this, we shaped the three values, and we then brought them to life during a team Away Day in December, when we collectively decided the commitments we all need to make to ensure they are lived.

And ‘living’ the values is an important emphasis. Printing our values and only hanging them on the wall is not enough. They need to be turned into daily habits and behaviours. This needs effort, encouragement, and ownership throughout the whole organisation. We are working our values into our culture – tracking our delivery against them – and into our appraisal and development system. We look forward to sharing our stories of success with you.

So, the BYCS Organizational Values are:

Pioneering
The BYCS motto is ‘We do it first, or we do it ten times better, or we don’t do it’. We know that we can only fulfil our mission through bold and breakthrough actions. We apply innovation, creativity and visionary leadership to all we do.

Committed
We always ask ‘Where can the bicycle take us?’ It drives us every day to go further and imagine more. We are passionate about our positive future vision, and we inject our energy, determination, and professionalism into achieving it.

Collaborative
We scale our impact by creating powerful partnerships and connecting to global movements. We also ensure others can easily build on our insights. And we utilize the full range of skills across our dynamic, international team, and our Bicycle Mayor network.

To ensure we meet these expectations of ourselves, we need to also continuously develop our own individual competencies. To that end, we have defined 8 individual values that we hope everyone who works at or with BYCS can adopt or gain inspiration from. These are: Purpose, Entrepreneurship, Effectiveness, Leadership, Creativity, Communication, Awareness and Resilience. These provide important guidance at a company like BYCS that has a fast-moving, entrepreneurial work culture, where everyone is invited to contribute in all areas. Of course, behind each of these words lies more detailed guidance and inspiration to help everyone find ways to develop in these areas. (If you’d like more information let us know).

The BYCS Values are live, measurable and visible guides to steer everyone on our shared path. Join us in 2019 as we journey with them to greater success. And start to embed values into your work today.

Also: take a look at our 2018 Impact Snapshot to see how we are progressing to our 50by30 mission.