Many changes have occurred at Grand Rapids Metrology over the past couple years. From a new name and logo to a new technician training program and an expanded scope, all aspects of our business have been touched by these exciting changes. Although we have been in operation since 1922, a fifth-generation family business nonetheless, we thought it was time to take a second glance at our values and purpose in order to keep up with all our other developments.
The idea behind this revision was not an attempt to dampen or change our family values, but an attempt to condense our values, make them easily memorable, and implement them into everyday life here at GRM. Our prior mission and values statement was far too long and could not be recited by a large majority of our employees. We need values that were simple yet meaningful. After this realization, a team of ten GRM employees was established and were given the task of revamping our current company values and purpose.
Grand Rapids Metrology’s previous mission/purpose was as stated, “Our mission is to develop honest and trusting relationships with our customers and to provide them with the highest quality weighing and measuring solutions tailored to their individual needs.” The values that accompanied that statement were: Integrity, Passion, People Commitments, Compliance, Success, Improvement, Community (each value has an accompanying sentence, these are simply the key words they are based upon). The process of creating a new set of values that exemplified our family beliefs and embodied the changes that have come and will continue to come to Grand Rapids Metrology was a difficult one. The team assigned to the job held multiple meetings and in total the process took about twelve weeks to complete. The Values Team, as we liked to call them, attributed their success to the passion of the team leader and the dynamic of the team as a whole. Team members said they collaborated well together, for initially they had a jumble of ideas but were ultimately able to narrow them down through various discussions and a voting process.
As of recently, GRM’s new values and purpose have been completed and we are truly satisfied with the results. Our new purpose: Measuring Success. Our new values; Exceed expectations every day, Inspire positive attitudes and family values, Collaborate through shared knowledge, Innovate for creative solutions, and Embrace and drive change.
Simply creating these new values was not the sole objective of our team. It was also their responsibility to find concrete ways to implement these values into everyday life for our current employees, future employees, customers, vendors, and community. For our current employees, the Values Team came up with ideas such as displaying the values on the wall of our (presently being renovated) headquarters, naming the new conference rooms after our values, integrating them into annual performance reviews, nominating and awarding co-workers for positively demonstrating our values, and designing coffee cups, magnets, sticker, etc. with our value icons. For our future employees, GRM plans to include questions about their demonstration of values in past experience as well as including the values into their initial training. Finally, for our customers, vendors, and community, the team suggested all employees add the value image (as seen above) to our emails to serve as a constant reminder of what GRM stands behind. Likewise, they proposed we create a blog post about to value revisions (i.e. what we are doing right now) to inform, and to create a new page on our website (also currently undergoing renovation) dedicated exclusively to our purpose and values.
Taking an in-depth look at who Grand Rapids Metrology is an organization and what we want to represent was not a project to be taken lightly. This team did an excellent job of condensing and implementing our new set of values. Grand Rapids Metrology is immensely proud of the work our team did and the new values they have create. GRM’s hope to embody our new purpose and values each and every day in hopes of bettering ourselves and our company as a whole.
