In times of recession in the global economy, businesses must take a closer look at their abilities to expand by their own means. This calls for a strong identity and confidence — and for a renewal of company values. But how exactly do successful companies revitalize their DNA to succeed: both internally with highly motivated, skilled staff and externally in the global marketplace?

Download / View News Release:

MS-Word (.doc)

Text (.txt)

Acrobat (.pdf)

Image Gallery

OLATHE, KANSAS (JUNE 20, 2011) —The world’s largest manufacturer of pumps and pump technology has since its founding in 1945 focused on values and has never finished a year in the red. Despite the financial crisis, Grundfos Pumps has become even stronger, with huge investments in research and development and no debt. These values unite Grundfos and make the company something special. These values are at the core of the Grundfos identity. On Monday, June 20, the entire organization worldwide will participate in a daylong, “What Unites Us” event that will begin the process of working with a new set of revitalized Grundfos values.

Why revitalize? The world is changing and so is Grundfos, more rapidly than ever. In this mode of constant development, it is necessary to check the company values from time to time to make sure that they are relevant to the business and to the marketplace of today and to make sure they reflect the thinking and language of the current employees, according to Jes Munk Hansen, CEO of Grundfos in North America.

“A large part of the explanation why we have decided to revitalize our values now is that we have great ambitions for the future,” he explains. “We want to expand our company both geographically and into new areas of business. In this process, there is the risk of forgetting who we are. And we don’t want that to happen.

The “old” value statements were written more than ten years ago when Grundfos was a smaller, less globalized company, notes Hansen. “A new generation of people have entered the company, seeing the company with new eyes, so we have to update the value statements to make sure that they are still relevant. We are not talking about new values, but we need to tune the values to match Grundfos of today.

"We need to be united in our values to have a strong profile in the market,” says Hansen. “We need to be recognized as Grundfos everywhere we do business, so that customers and other business partners know what to expect from us."

Through dialogue and involvement from staff and leaders from various corners of the organization, six rephrased values have been established:

Sustainable;
Open and Trustworthy;
Focused on People;
Independent;
Partnership;
Relentlessly Ambitious.

Comments Hansen: “The validation process opened our eyes to the need of local interpretation of the values. Not in the sense that we have different values from one country to the next, but the values have to be interpreted and understood in a local context.”

The values were originally born out of the long history of Grundfos as a Danish industrial company, according to Hansen. “We have to acknowledge this and at the same time bring the values into the local context of our 80 companies around the world. This interpretation does not emerge if we just communicate the values in writing. People need to sit down with their colleagues locally and discuss what each of the values means.”

Day of values: The next major milestone in the value rollout is a 24-hour, “What Unites Us” event on June 20. On this day, all 17,000 employees at Grundfos operations worldwide, including Grundfos North America, will attend 1,200 workshops to discuss what the values mean and how they are used. During the workshops, all employees will have the opportunity to tell their versions of the values via text messages, photos and video uploads on a global value website.

“We will hear 17,000 voices, discussing the values and what they mean to us and feeding our value stories into the value website to create one big story about the Grundfos values,” Hansen explains. “I am sure all these stories will give us valuable input for our business in the long view. They can be used when we introduce new employees, when we are to prepare meetings with colleagues from other countries, when we need examples for customer presentations and in many other situations in everyday business.”

For more information on the What Unites Us event, contact: Dan Prangsgaard, Head of Public Affairs & Public Relations; tel.: 913 608 6046; e-mail: dprangsgaard@grundfos.com

ABOUT GRUNDFOS PUMPS:

Grundfos Pumps Corporation, part of the Grundfos Group, is a global pumps and pumping systems leader serving the residential, commercial-building and process-industry markets, as well as being a major supplier to the water-supply and water-treatment industries. Founded in 1945 in Bjerringbro, Denmark, The Grundfos Group is a worldwide enterprise that employs more than 18,000 people in 81 countries with North American headquarters in Olathe, Kan.

For more information, visit the website at www.grundfos.us.

For editorial assistance, contact Tom Phillips, Grundfos Pumps in Olathe, Kansas; tel.: 913.227.3411; E-mail: tphillips@grundfos.com.

# # #

IMAGE GALLERY

To download a hi-res .tif file, click on the desired image and a zip archive automatically downloads to your computer. Due to how various browers handle downloads, you may have to expand the zip archive manually. The zip archive expands into a .tif file (300ppi; CMYK).

The six revitalized Grundfos values were established through a recent dialogue that involved staff and leaders from various corners of the organization. File Name: _MG_0758.tif

The Grundfos Pumps Day of Values has the theme, "What Unites Us," as employees will discuss the six newly revitalized values: Sustainable; Open and Trustworthy; Focused on People; Independent; Partnership; and Relentlessly Ambitious. File Name: _MG_0767.tif

The "What Unites Us" day of values will take place in five U.S locations, as well as in Canada and Mexico, and will include approximately 1,500 employees in North America. File Name: _MG_1575.tif