How To Maximize Your Company Values

How To Maximize Your Company Values

     Company values are, at their core, designed to be the fundamental beliefs that drive company decisions and behaviors.  Imagine a ship sailing across the ocean but is missing one key component: the rudder.  Can that ship accurately or effectively reach its destination?  The same is true for an organization.  All companies have strategic goals they are trying to reach but without the rudder, the core values, it is extremely difficult to navigate the waves of everyday decisions.  Core values truly drive an organization forward.  So why do so many companies simply place them on the wall and have no way of reinforcing them?
     Well, one of the easiest temptations is the concept of “rebranding”.  Too often, we see this happen by gathering the administration, or higher-level employees, into a room and spending two hours to develop the company’s new values.  However, as discussed above, company values hold a much more significant importance to the success of a company. 
​
Learning Laboratory – Client Success Story
     A past client fell right into this temptation.  When “rebranding”, the administration spent their weekly one-hour meeting developing their new company values.  The next week they rolled out their new values to the entire company by posting them on each employee’s nametag and sticking them up on the walls.  Three months later, as we arrived for our training, we decided to use the company values as a way to intertwine our materials with something they already knew.  When I asked them what their core values were, I could literally hear the crickets in the room. 
     As we continued working with this group, our team quickly discovered another problem.  We worked on the concept of appreciation by asking the group to look for places where their coworkers were using the core values.  When reviewing the results after one week, every example was about an employee interacting with a customer.  Though this was a good first step, this trend continued.  Finally, we asked them about where they were using the core values with each other in the office.  Interestingly, not a single person could come up with an example of where they were using the core values with each other.  This is where we had a very important revelation: the administration had designed their core values to focus on the customer and did not focus on how they drive business decisions and behavior.

Coaching Tips
     Every time we finish a presentation or workshop, an individual will come up to our team member and say the same thing: can you fix this problem I am dealing with in this 60-second conversation.  Every time the answer is no.  So, when we write our Coaching Tips, they are designed to spark some energy and creativity in you.

1. Gain Input from Employees – This step is unique to your organization but is essential to gaining ownership (not just buy-in) from your employees.  By figuring out how to involve the employees in the development of the core values, you create a sense of ownership in the end decision.  For a small company, a half day retreat allows time to work on this process.  For a large company, it could be small focus groups or large surveys to gain understanding of employees’ values.
2. Clearly Define Values – The most successful companies take the time to clearly define their values from all aspects (internal use, customer use, marketing use, etc.) and departments (accounting, sales, administration, support staff, etc.).  We have seen companies have their employees provide definitions to shape an understanding for the company as a whole.
3. Constantly Reinforce – As coaches, we suggest three main areas of reinforcement of the core values.  First, with all big decisions made within the company, departments and teams, bringing the decisions back to the core values that drove the decisions will help reinforce the values.  Second, in all meetings, creating a system to either acknowledge values at the beginning or tie decisions and goals to the values will help consistently reinforce them.  Lastly, all performance reviews should incorporate the core values and bring clarity to how they are living out those values with customers, coworkers, etc.