Blog
Articulating our value base
Sharing the value base that drives us individually and collectively, and will underpin our work.
By: Dr Hilary Causer and Dr Karen Shaw
In November 2024 our geographically diverse team gathered in London for our second ‘in-person’ team meeting. We usually meet online, so our in-person meetings are becoming a special highlight in our annual calendar.
A focus for this meeting was ‘getting to know you’. We were approaching the end of our first year of working together, and our professional connections felt strong and established. However, working remotely, we miss out on those spontaneous corridor conversations, shared lunches, and water-cooler moments. We had agreed to each ‘bring a value’ to the meeting to share with our colleagues and to develop an understanding of the value base that drives us individually and collectively.
As we each presented our values to our colleagues, we were delighted, but probably not too surprised, to see common ground and overlaps appearing.
Following this meeting we invited the members of our Nurse Advisory Group to contribute the values that matter to them, and we shared our list of values with our stakeholder group for their input too.
Values
Here is the list of the values that drive our team and will underpin our work:
Compassion and kindness (for yourself and others)
Integrity
Authenticity
Transparency
Honesty
Humility
Creativity
Curiosity
Open-mindedness
Collaboration
Responsibility
Empathy
Respect
Tolerance
Being Heard
Psychological safety
Its ok to not be ok
Shared understanding
As a team of women, we are inter-disciplinary, ethnically and geographically diverse; we are at different career stages and have different professional, educational, and socio-economic backgrounds. We are united in coming together to work on this project.
Articulating our shared values is an important step for us as a team in developing unity, shared understanding and a sense of belonging. Most importantly though, in creating this shared value base and publishing it here, we are not only holding ourselves to account but also, asking others to hold us to account. This is how we want to do our work; these are the values that we aim to bring to our research design, to our data collection and analysis, to underpin our reporting and dissemination, our decision making and our collaborations.
As listed above, we want to work transparently, with integrity, honesty and authenticity. We share this blog with you as an enactment of those values.
The study values are also published on the home page