Let’s Focus on Organizational Values!
What are Organizational Values?
Core values are the DNA of your organization’s culture. They are the worthwhile traits or qualities and are driving forces and the highest priorities for people. Values are the behaviors and mindsets that are needed to reach the vision of the organization. Organizational values describe the core ethics or principles that the company will stand for, no matter what.
These values guide your organization’s thinking and actions and represent the foundation on which the company is formed. In terms of culture and values, actions speak louder than words. Values, attitudes and behaviors create a personality which attracts and keeps great talent, creates a positive public image and helps build long-term relationships with stakeholders.
Organizational culture is the product of an organization’s values. These values allow us to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable to our co-workers, our customers, and our community. When a culture is clearly defined, it makes it easier for leaders and employees to demonstrate better judgment, helping people understand how to behave, interact, treat each other, and respond to events and changes in our work environment.
Values declare what is important to you and to your organization. They reflect who you are, what you do and how you do it: your culture. Take a moment to reflect on your behavior and the types of decisions you have made. Do your actions align with your beliefs? Have you ever had to compromise your values in order to do what you were asked to do? How did this make you feel?
When teams share the same values and a common way of thinking and acting, their collaborative efforts are strengthened, productivity increases, and performance improves. When the core organizational values are not embraced and rehearsed by everyone in the organization, then culture can become a liability. This breakdown can restrict your organization’s ability to reach its strategic goals, and this can cost you money. When our behavior is not aligned with our values, we experience stress, frustration, and pain which impacts our organizations.
If you are the founder of an organization, your values spread through the workplace. You tend to hire people who share your values.
Understanding and Assessing Your Organizational Values
In order to understand and identify the values of an organization and to gauge their influence on the company, managers must carefully examine how that organization operates. Not only it is helpful to listen to employees describe what they believe the values of the organization are, it is far better to observe those people in their day-to-day activities.
Observe how employees spend their time, how they communicate within the organization and how they do their daily job tasks and responsibilities. Values are usually revealed by employees’ actions and thinking, how they set their priorities, and how they allocate their time and energy and what they talk about. An employee’s actions are more revealing than their words.
This assessment is a benchmark of your current culture. You need to assess where your company stands. What do people say about your organization, both externally and internally? You need to interview vendors, clients, employees and your leadership team—through focus groups or surveys. Ask them what words they would use to describe what’s important to the organization and how effective the organization is at putting those values into action. Then you can prepare a draft of values based on what your employees and stakeholders revealed. Identifying existing values in your workplace helps you determine if they are right values for your organization.
It is also important to review your strategic business plan. You need to think about the future of your company. Where does your organization want to be in one, three or five years? It is important to define where you are headed. Your executive team can help you define the future plans for growth, revenue, expansion, human resources and what ethical shifts you want to make in the future.
Developing and Improving Your Organizational Values
Define your Organizational Values
Defining values is about defining what matters and where people spend time and energy. It’s the first and most critical step in its formation and development. While differences in opinion and skills may be beneficial to the success of an organization, a unity of purpose and values must be maintained. A clear set of values sets the tone for the actions people take. Leaders should define what behaviors should be considered the standard among coworkers in dealing with customers and how employees want it to feel working in this company.
Review the value assessment that you have done in the previous step based on your initial survey or focus group and decide if those are the values needed to reach your strategic goals. Maybe you need to shift your values. You need to choose values that make your business stand apart. Core values should be at the heart of what makes it special to work at your company. They define a clear set of directions for reaching your organizational goals and destination. You need to make it clear that what specific behaviors and processes the employee is supposed to do to honor these values.
A well-defined organizational value will guide staff behavior, provide a foundation for your employment policies and operational decisions. It demonstrates integrity and accountability to external stakeholders and set your organization apart from your competitors.
Incorporate Values into Your Business Processes
Your newly defined values will need to be integrated in all operational areas, including the talent lifecycle. If you want people to truly live the values, you need to make them actionable. Let people know how they should demonstrate them in action. For example, if one of your values is open communication, you need to show them what does this look like in everyday behaviors. By giving specific examples, you create a road map for your employees. It is also important that your values be incorporated in the operation and customer service processes.
Align Recruitment and Hiring Practices with Values
A powerful foundation of values for your organization will help you hire the right people and build an organization culture that’s engaging, genuine and impactful. It will be the foundation of your employment branding. If organizations know what they are and what they are not, they will be able to attract and retain the right employees and repel the ones that just don’t fit. Organizational culture and employment branding increase the ROI (Return of Investment) of recruitment and retention programs and will increase the profitability of the business.
Clear values will help you attract the right people customers and collaborators as well and will increase their loyalty, trust and cooperation. If organizational values don’t resonate with staff, it can de-motivate them, alienate customers and diminish the credibility of leaders and managers. Your company should incorporate committable values into its hiring and firing processes as this sends a clear message about what your company stands for.
Use the interview process to find people who have similar values, hire them and promote those whose actions align with the values. You need to ask candidates about their own values and clarify values in employee contracts. It is important to develop some questions to probe the candidate’s fit with your values. It is as important as having the required skill set and experience level.
Incorporate Values into Onboarding and Training Processes
You need to teach those values and clarify
them through diverse examples via your onboarding and training processes. Just
listing your core values and expecting people to adapt them is unrealistic.
Formal training will enforce practicing values. It is vital to convert values into specific,
behavioral examples. By modeling and rewarding behaviors that demonstrate each
value, employees are constantly reminded of what their company stands for and
how to better work by those principles.
Align Values with Reward Management Strategies
Leaders and employees represent the organizational brand. They should be accountable to the values, mission, and vision of the organization. Keeping someone whose views and behaviors clash with the culture sends a negative message to the rest of the company. Even a top performer whose values mismatch with the company shouldn’t be part of the organization. You need to include behavior-based core value questions in the interview process and use them in performance reviews and promotion decisions.
Rewards and recognition within the organization are structured to recognize those people whose work embodies the values of the organization. You can use spot-bonuses, and peer-voting opportunities that give employees the opportunity to nominate co-workers for successfully living the values, and written recognition in newsletters or on websites. It is also important to terminate employees who violate the core values. When an employee consistently challenges the desired and required behaviors of an organization, this impacts their personal and organizational performance. It is valuable to publicly reward someone for exhibiting behaviors that are aligned with the company’s personage.
Integrate Values in Performance Reviews and Provide Ongoing Feedback
Small integrity slips have a negative impact on a company culture. Make sure that disrespecting standards doesn’t become the standard behavior. You need to integrate the core values into the performance review process and measure how well they are acted upon. This practice should be taken seriously. It is not just about getting things done; it’s about how things are getting done. It is important to go beyond individual performers and check the organizational climate as well.
Leaders should seek outsiders’ feedback to critique organizational actions. Strong organizations actively seek out feedback from anyone who has contact with that organization; because sometimes outsiders can find blind spots and encourage growth with their different point of view.
Effectively Communicate Values
It is vital to clearly articulate the values throughout the organization and, when there is a need for any changes in direction, let people know. Otherwise, employees may take the wrong road. Values need to be articulated in an easy way and filter down to every person in the organization.
Companies must ensure alignment between internal and external messaging. Are employees communicating the brand and company values properly? Does the company messaging in marketing materials and social media accurately reflect the internal messages around the values?
It is beneficial to use the power of storytelling to talk about the organization’s core values in the language of daily business.
Walk the Talk
Strong leadership teams demonstrate congruence in their actions and behaviors as it relates to their values. This creates clarity for the people and contributes to high energy levels and stronger employee commitment which leads to higher retention and increased productivity. Leaders in high-performing cultures practice what they preach and respond rather than react. Employees want to be on the winning team and work for responders not reactors.
Make sure that you and your senior team live the values in all you do. Words without evidence increase people’s skepticism about the credibility of corporate values. True behavior wins respect. Setting core values, and not practicing them, is worse than not establishing them at all.
Be Consistent
Repetition enhances believability. Acting with values shouldn’t be considered special events. Take every opportunity to promote the values and keep them alive. It is important to maintain them in good times and bad. What a company does in times of adversity is even more important than what it does when all is going smoothly. It would be easy to adhere to desired behaviors when things are going well, but it’s most important to stand by what you believe at your core in a difficult time.
Helena Emami