One of my all-time favourite topics -and no, not just because I like a good list of words on a wall (although I do love a good font). In this episode, I'm diving deep into the heart and soul of practice values - how to pick them, but also how to actually use them. Whether you're creating your values from scratch or dusting them off for a refresh, I’ll walk you through what’s worked in my own practice, what hasn’t, and how you can truly bring those words to life in your team.

Here’s what I cover:

• Why it's totally okay to choose your practice values yourself
• A simple process for involving your team without handing them a blank page
• How to choose meaningful values (and not just what you think you should choose)
• What to do if your values no longer feel right (spoiler: it’s fine to change them!)
• How to define your values with real, everyday language
• The game-changing "one-pager" tool I use for each value
• Examples of behaviours that do and don’t reflect a core value like adaptability
• 4 practical ways to keep values alive in your practice: in interviews, onboarding, monthly awards, and performance reviews
• The power of storytelling in building a culture with heart

My big takeaways?

Practice values aren't just for posters or websites - they're for real life. They’re your practice’s compass. But they only work when they’re felt, shared, and lived every day. When you define them clearly and embed them into your systems (even the little ones), they stop being buzzwords and start becoming a guiding light.

And remember: values can evolve. If yours need a tweak or even a full refresh, that’s not a failure - that’s growth.

Thanks for listening.

I hope this episode helped you reconnect with the purpose and heart behind your business. If you know another practice owner who might be wrestling with this stuff too, feel free to send it their way. And as always, if you want more support, ideas, and good company—come join us at theconnectionco.com.au. I’d love to welcome you there.

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Welcome to My Good Allied Health.

Practice, the podcast for allied health business.

Owners who are looking to bring smart and heart together on their journey.

On the podcast, I'll cover things about being vulnerable and brave, pivoting failures, good wins, things that work, things that don't work, and I'll talk with other practice owners who are doing good in their journeys.

I'm Amy Geach, practice owner and mum, and I'm here because I believe in you.

So let's go forward on this journey together.

Hello and welcome back to My Good Art Health Practice.

I'm Amy Gatesch and today we're diving into one of my favourite all time topics which is practice values.

I am a heart and soul girl and I really love helping practice owners get more heart and soul into their business.

And practice values is a really great way of doing that.

Now, before you are thinking that you might switch off because you've already got practice values, tick that box.

I really want you to hang with me because today isn't just about choosing nice sounding words and popping them on a poster.

This episode is about how to use your values, how to make them real, how to weave them into the day to day of your practice, even in small, non cheesy, non corporate ways.

So I'm going to give you a couple of examples from my practice.

Now, whether you're just starting out and defining your values or maybe you're wondering if the ones you have still fit and feel right for you, I really want to walk you through what's worked for me and how we keep our values alive.

So let's dive in and get started.

Let's talk first of all about where values come from.

Right.

Let's start right at the beginning.

Who actually decides the values in your business?

A lot of people will say, get your team involved.

And yes, involving your team is really powerful, especially if you're at a stage where your culture is growing and evolving together.

So really great.

But I also want to say this really clearly.

It's also totally okay to create your values yourself.

And why I say this is because this is your business, this is your vision, this is your tone, and this is your brand.

And you get to do this amazing thing of setting the atmosphere that you want to create in your clinic and that includes choosing the values that guide it.

For me, I did involve my team, but it's good to give people a starting point.

So if you are wanting to involve your team, what I would recommend is instead of handing them a blank sheet and just asking, what do you think our Values should be.

I would recommend you give them a short list of words that you have already chosen and are aligned with and that you are wanting to build on and then ask for their input.

So you might start off with 10 words, for example, that really resonate with you and get your team involved to pick the final five, for example.

And I think that's a really nice way to get your team involved.

And then as you.

As I go through the next stages of how to make your values real in your practice, there's lots of other opportunities for your team to get involved and give input.

Okay, now a couple of tips for choosing and defining your values.

When it comes to picking your values, I recommend.

Keep it simple.

Three to five values is a really great number.

I think any more than five and they can start to lose a bit of impact.

They're harder for your team members to remember or your clients to remember.

And sometimes I think if you're getting up to five or six or more, you'll most likely find that you're in a situation where you could join a couple of them together.

Okay.

Because they start to become similar, then I really encourage you to choose words that actually mean something to you.

And this is harder than I think we often give the process credit for because we're so tempted to write down the words we think we should have.

And I.

And I don't think we go into it going, I wonder what words I should have.

But we just naturally end up picking words that we think we should have and not the ones that actually reflect how you want people to act and feel in your business.

So that's one of the biggest challenges, is picking words that are the heart and soul of your business.

And the reason it's really important to get this right is because these values are going to become a guiding light for anyone that comes into your team to help you.

It's going to really set.

Set the expectations around the behavior and the way we show up at work.

And then that has such a flow on effect to how we interact with clients, how we interact with referrers, et cetera.

So picking the words is really, really important.

Now, don't stress if you pick some and you think, yeah, these are winners, this feels so good.

And in a year's time, you think one of them's off.

It's not sitting for me.

It's not feeling right.

You can change it.

It's okay.

They're changeable.

That's okay.

Once you have chosen, I want you to then not stop at just having a Word.

Right.

I think that's one of the biggest.

I don't want to use the word mistake, but that's one of the biggest things we can do that limit us in our business.

Once you've chosen the words, let's use, say the word adaptability.

Right.

That's one of the values in my own practice.

It's really important you define what that word actually means in your individual practice.

Okay.

Because the word adaptability, if we take that as the example, can mean all sorts of things to all, all different people in different practices.

So people coming in to work with me need to know exactly what does adaptability mean in this particular practice?

So I'm going to read you out what our definition is of adaptability.

In our practice now, we have five core values, and so this is just one of them.

And I'm going to read it out just to give you an example, and I'm going to try and read it without sounding robot.

So let's see how we go.

Okay.

Adaptability.

At Healthnest, we believe in challenging the status quo and being prepared to step outside the box.

We are flexible without complaint.

We are ready to change and update therapy options as needed.

We make decisions that are proactive and thought out and benefit the company, our clients, and each other.

We treat clients with an individual approach, and we don't engage in cookie cutter or one size fits all approaches to therapy.

We come together as a team in unpredictable circumstances.

We are accepting of new ideas and procedures that are designed to help us work effectively and efficiently.

And we trust in the journey of small business and have a growth mindset.

Okay, so that, that's the blurb on what adaptability means in our practice.

And I feel really strongly that if you define the values in your own words and you give your team a shared understanding of what it looks like, it becomes more than tick a box.

We've got our values listed.

It really becomes that guidepost for your team going forward.

This is one of those opportunities where you can get your team involved.

If you've chosen your words, you can then sit down with your team and say, okay, let's unpack what adaptability means.

Let's unpack what growth means.

Let's unpack what learning means in our particular practice and get their ideas and bring those together into the meaning of the word.

Okay, Next, we really need to make the values actionable.

And you can call this all sorts of things, a behavior guide.

Can't think of any other words off the top of my head.

But anyway, let's take the words and the meaning and then do the next step.

And this is where we create, I think, one of the most useful things that I know I've done in my practice and I recommend it to every allied health business owner that I come across for sure.

And I talk about this a lot in my membership.

What I want you to do for each value that you have in your practice is create a one pager.

And on that one pager I want you to include that short paragraph about defining the value in your language that you use in your practice.

So you heard me describe adaptability, right?

So that paragraph that I read out about adaptability is, is going at the top of the page.

Then I want you to list behaviors that reflect that value.

So if your staff member was, were to pick up the one pager and read through it, they would know the types of behaviors that they can engage in that meet that particular value.

And then on the same page, a list of behaviors that don't reflect that value.

Right.

That we, we don't want to be seeing these particular behaviors because they're not going to match into this value.

And I find this kind of resource is gold in any practice because it helps your team see how values actually show up, not just in the big moments, but in the everyday stuff.

It can outline how to speak to clients, how we communicate with teammates, how we manage feedback, pressure, change.

And it also makes performance discussions so much clearer and more objective because you've already set the benchmark and you can set this benchmark together.

So when we did this part in my own team many years ago, I got everybody in my team at that time to contribute their ideas, two or three ideas for each value as to behavior.

Examples that reflect the value and those that don't reflect the value.

And I put those together and that what created this document for us.

And I find it really, really powerful.

And if anyone is out there listening and think, oh, performance discussions, don't like them.

This is your biggest friend in any kind of performance discussion because it lights the way every single time.

Okay, so once you have that and I'm going to give you a couple of examples off mine.

So I talked about adaptability being one of our core values.

So examples of behaviours that match that value of adaptability that I have on my one pager, I'm going to read a couple of them out.

The first one is not being swayed by other providers and copying what others do just to fit in, sharing workspaces and equipment, learning new systems, praising a staff member even if they do something a different way to you.

Putting in the time to learn a new skill.

Managing suggestions for change with respect and an open mind.

Okay, then I've got listed examples of behaviours that do not match that value of adaptability.

And remember, these have been put together by my team at the time when we brought our values together like this.

So examples of behaviours that do not match are being rigid in our thinking and saying no without coming up with a counter suggestion.

Not using a new system because you're used to the old one and you don't want any change.

Complaining about tasks that are part of helping a client or a team member.

So there's a lot more, but that's just some of them.

I wanted to read some out just to give you a bit of an idea.

Next, I want you thinking about how you can bring values into everyday practice.

Because I don't want the these to be something that kind of just sits in a filing system on your computer somewhere that you bring out when it's performance review time or you pop them on your website for your clients to see.

And you get so used to seeing the words that they just become so habitual that they lose their meaning.

And I think it's really important then to keep bringing values into the everyday practice.

Now, I'm going to address this in terms of staff members, but there are lots of ways that you could bring values into everyday practice for your client benefits as well.

So let's talk about staff here in this particular episode.

So once you have defined your values, the next step is embedding them.

It doesn't have to be flashy, but in these consistent little touch points.

And there's lots of ways I do this in my own practice, but I'm going to share four of them with you.

The first one is during interviews.

Now, I have a previous podcast episode where I talk about some of my favorite interview questions that I love so much.

And one of the questions that made it to that list is asking people about the values that we have in our practice.

Now, they haven't worked in our practice, but I read out our values to them and I ask them to pick one that resonates with them and explain why to me.

Now, there's no right or wrong in terms of which one they pick, but it really tells me a lot about their alignment with our culture and it gives me an opportunity to share our values right there before people even come on board.

It's right in that interview stage.

So I love that question in an interview.

The second way that we bring values into everyday practice is during our onboarding, every single new team member learns the values of our business from day to day one.

Right.

It's one of the very, very first documents that we give to people.

And I find this really important for people to know from the start and it's helpful for them as well.

They're coming into this new environment.

How do they behave, how do they conduct themselves, how do they show up to get the.

That, you know, tick from their peers that they're joining.

And the core values written on that one pager is a perfect way for them really quickly to understand the things that they can do to really get into the culture nice and quickly and the things to avoid doing.

So I love that.

Okay.

The next thing that we do is.

And we've had this going for quite a few years now.

It is our monthly Values Awards.

Now, I used to initially choose the people who were up for the Values Awards, but we've now made it peer nominated over the last year and that is working really beautifully.

So each month our team can nominate each other for our Values Awards and they've simply called that the Values Awards.

Here's the important bit.

They don't just name the value, they tell the story of how their colleague team member have lived into that value.

So, for example, I'm nominating Abby for adaptability because last week she.

And then I tell the story of why I might be nominating her and each team member actually shares what happened.

And initially I had to give a bit of nudging for them to give the detail of the story.

It doesn't have to be a big essay, but it's easy to say Abby was adaptable, is always adaptable and always helpful.

Like that's easy to say.

But I wanted to know why.

What is Abby specifically doing?

And so we have all these amazing stories now that we are gathering of our team members and how they're greeting clients in the waiting room or.

Or how they've gone on a limb for somebody or what they did at lunchtime for a particular team member.

Like, the detail of the story is so wonderful.

There's so much gold in there.

And I'm not going to put my hand up here and say that was my brilliant idea.

Because this idea came from Tristan White, who runs the physio company and he has been a real leader in allied health around developing strong team cultures.

We've had him come and speak as a guest at our Mastermind and I really love his approach to building team culture.

It's really wonderful.

He's got a book out where he talks through some of his key things and he really emphasizes the power of storytelling and any practice owner out there listening who wants to have a smart business that's doing good things, but once that heart and soul in it as well, then power of storytelling cannot be underestimated.

I love it so much.

Okay, the next thing that we do to keep the values alive in our practice is we integrate them into any performance reviews that we do.

And most recently in our practice we've started a process where having quarterly growth check ins with the team members.

And I'm loving them so much.

Part of that is gathering peer feedback because it's really nice to know how your peers think you are going.

I think that's really lovely feedback when you work with them, you know, day, day in, day out.

And one of the questions that we ask in the peer feedback survey is does this team member live into the values?

And they give a rating of how well that they believe that team member, you know, lives and works into the values of the company.

And it's really a nice reminder that these values are really important in our practice and are a guiding light and they're the type of behaviors that we want to be, you know, rewarding and giving shout outs for.

So there we have it.

Some tips and tricks on developing your values and extending them into having those beautiful definitions and the behaviors that match the values and any behaviors that don't match the values that you don't really want to be seeing in your practice.

And I hope you've enjoyed a couple of the ways that I integrate the values into my practice.

Until next time, have a review of your values.

Think back to where those words came from.

Are they still singing for you?

And if they are, amazing, amazing.

What else can you do to incorporate them into everyday practice for yourself?

If you look back and think, I don't know, I don't know about these values, that's okay, do a review.

Are there any other words that hit you in the soul a little bit harder that you want to incorporate?

And that's fine.

As I said early on, you can change them.

You can absolutely change them.

Thank you so much for listening and.

I look forward to sharing with you in my next episode.

Thank you for being here.

I am incredibly grateful.

If you have a friend that would find this helpful, please go ahead and.

Share it with them too.

You can learn more about me and.

How to be part of my Allied Health Connection community.

Over@theconnectionco.com.