Over the course of the last year, a dedicated team of A2LA employees were entrusted with the task of identifying and codifying a set of core values that capture A2LA’s ideals and provide a benchmark for our future endeavors. The five-person group included members from several different A2LA departments, to help lend a diverse perspective to the process. “The values chosen are meant to exemplify A2LA’s culture and what makes our company unique.” Explained Ashley Kamauf, A2LA’s Inspection Body Program Manager and a member of the team responsible for developing the core values. “It was emphasized that the values should not be aspirational, but rather a formal documentation of how we are already operating. The process took about 5 months and involved a few iterations.”
During the early phases, the team reached out to coworkers to understand what traits they believe A2LA embodies and took a long hike together at Sugarloaf Mountain to muse on A2LA’s culture and philosophy. They also had several intensive brainstorming sessions where they assembled truly dizzying collections of adjectives, nouns, and adverbs – some more applicable than others. At the end of the process they approached the Board of Directors with their shortlist of ideas, and the Board helped to pare their efforts down to five words, each with a short accompanying statement for context. Now that their work is complete, A2LA is proud to officially announce our new core values:
Quality: Striving for Excellence
A2LA is dedicated to ensuring and advocating for quality in organizations and processes all over the world, but the value of quality reflects on all aspects of our organization. From our internal decision-making processes to the benefits and resources we provide our employees to the informational content we provide to the public; quality is the foundation of every decision we make at A2LA.
Integrity: Maintaining Trust Through Honoring Our Commitments
It is paramount that we continuously demonstrate our integrity to organizations, specifiers, communities, and individuals who place their trust in us. The only way to truly accomplish this is to prove our trustworthiness and reliability at every opportunity by honoring commitments we make to all stakeholders, both internal and external.
Community: Customer Focused, Service Driven, People First.
The foundation of the accreditation industry lies in serving the best interests of ordinary people. A2LA has the ability to affect positive change through small acts of service on a local level and greater contributions to global safety and quality, and we believe it is our obligation to act on that ability to the greatest extent possible. We strive to be a positive and unifying force within our industry and within our social communities.
Accountability: Set, Share, and Exceed Expectations. Make it Happen.
Accountability means more than doing what we are required to do, it means setting the bar high and always aiming to surpass it. It also means being transparent and taking responsibility for everything we do as an organization and as individuals. As one of the largest accreditation bodies in the world, A2LA has a weighty responsibility to global quality, and we treat that responsibility with appropriate respect.
Leadership: Advocating for a Better World Through Accreditation
A2LA believes that leadership means acting as an exemplar for our industry and an advocate for the people, organizations, and groups we serve. We hold ourselves to the highest standard because it inspires confidence in us and in the value of accreditation throughout the world.
Implementing these new core values has been the responsibility of a new four-person team of employees. Although these values were chosen because they already accurately represent A2LA, the implementation team has proposed new ways to demonstrate these ideals and to ensure that our decision-making continues to be informed by them in the future. They have created a matrix system that we can use to evaluate any major decisions relative to our core values, and provided a plan to help employees become familiar with these values and understand how to apply them in their day-to-day functions. They are continuing to propose more strategies to integrate these concepts into all aspects of A2LA.
The whole community of A2LA employees is very proud of the hard work our development and implementation teams have done to help make A2LA the best it can be. We look forward to exploring new ways to exemplify our core values in everything we do.