Company Core Values: How to Help Make Your Strategies Stick

Values are essential to achieving desired business outcomes, but only if a company takes organizational values seriously. Companies spend a lot of time creating company core values statements that end up being nothing more than words on the company website or a poster hanging in the lobby.

But for company core values to make a positive impact, they need to be a part of the corporate fabric – something people live and breathe daily.

Let's start by defining company values and why they're important.

Company values are the fundamental beliefs or standards of an organization. They're the guiding principles that help people understand the behavioral expectations for their jobs. In a nutshell, company core values are the principles that govern the way you do business.

Company core values benefit your customers, your company, and your employees. Your company values benefit customers by letting them know what they can expect from you. A distinct set of company values will help you stand out from the competition. Company values also aid in better decision-making: it's simpler for employees to make wise decisions that are consistent with the core values if they are aware of what your company stands for. Moreover, businesses with strong company core values, driven from the top down, can also attract and retain the best talent. All of this directly affects the bottom line.

How can you make your company core values meaningful in your own company or team? Here are some tips:

1. Create a clear understanding of your organizational values for all.

A consultant or the marketing department may have crafted a company's core values and may not always use language that's readily accessible to everyone. Company core values, like mission statements, need to be articulated in such a way that they easily flow from everyone's lips. 

Companies often obsess over wordsmithing and end up with vacuous statements. Use concrete language that everyone can relate to. Make the organizational values clearly say what you care about. Clarity makes it easier to implement values. 

Clearly define your company values and purpose with a mission and vision statement. Keep employees from guessing or struggling to understand the values. When employees are unclear about company values, they will substitute their own interpretation for the company's values which may not serve you well. Unclear and poorly implemented values can result in employee disengagement. 

2. Transform organizational values into tangible behaviors and practical guidelines.

How do you put core values into practice? More often than not, company values are generalized concepts that can be interpreted in various ways by different people. If you want people to live your company values, make them truly actionable.

Let's say one of your company values is "open communication." What does this look like for employees in their everyday behaviors? One of the actions aligned with this value might be: "Everyone in the organization, independent of position or title, is encouraged to provide criticism of anything they see that doesn't work." By giving specific examples, you place a road map in the hands of employees who are lost in the forest when it comes to espoused company values.

"By giving specific examples, you place a road map in the hands of employees who are lost in the forest when it comes to espoused company values."

3. Make values committable.

How do you promote your company core values? One way is to let people see that you are seriously committed to your organizational values. This means your company is willing to commit to its core values by going a long way to ensure the values are respected. For example, consider firing people who are not consistently living values after they have been coached, even if they're high performers.

This genuine commitment to company values makes values meaningful and actionable and sends a clear message that a company doesn't just pay lip service to organizational values. 

4. Use the interview process to find people with similar values – and hire those people.

Keep your company values in mind during the hiring process to help you identify candidates who share your organizational value.

For each of your organizational values, ensure you have carefully developed a set of questions to probe for the candidate's fit with your company values. Trust your gut feeling. For example, if one of your company values is humility, don't hire someone who shows signs of arrogance. Sooner or later, that person may negatively influence the culture you are trying to establish because they may not be a fit from the get-go. Make enough of these compromises in hiring, and the integrity of your company values is eroded – people then stop paying attention to the values.

5. Seek employees' feedback on your company core values.

Conduct anonymous surveys or hold open forums to learn what people think about the company's values. Allowing employees to share their thoughts and suggestions can help foster a culture of transparency and inclusivity.

Questions to consider are:

• Do employees see others living the organizational values?
• Does everyone even know what the organizational values are?
• Are there day-to-day practices you may not even be aware of that conflict or contradict your company values?
• Are management practices effective in fostering organizational values?

Ask for employee feedback more frequently than just once. Your company core values risk becoming meaningless platitudes that don't reflect your organizational culture as it grows and changes over time.

6. Uphold and promote company core values across the board.

Often company values are the purview of upper management, who champion the values but don't ensure they filter down to every person in the organization.

A powerful way to put values into practice is to ensure that every person in your shop or team lives the company values – whether it's the sales clerk, vice president, manager, or machinist. Everyone, no matter their position, needs to be held accountable for exemplifying the values in their daily work.

7. Use your core company values to empower employees.

Organizational values are a company's megaphone. You can empower employees by replacing onerous policy manuals and handbooks and educating everyone on company values.

It's impossible to come up with a rule for everything. Company values become the compass that guides employees in making decisions. It empowers them to use their judgment. For example, say one of your values is "customer satisfaction." Using the value of "customer satisfaction" as a guide allows those employees closest to the customer the flexibility to make appropriate decisions on the spot, even if they deviate from standard company rules. So, living the value of customer satisfaction rather than lockstep adherence to the process gives employees the authority to bend the rules somewhat when necessary. 

Empowerment is especially important today, with our global economy, where employees are scattered across satellite offices.

8. Communicate the core company values often.

Repetition enhances believability. Take every opportunity to promote your values and keep them alive. To increase trust in your organizational values, communicate about the core values at regular intervals. For example, you can start a meeting by reminding everyone of your company values. On a regular basis, you can share stories of employees living these values. Did something go wrong because an employee didn't adhere to the values? Use this as a teachable moment for everyone.

9. Set an example by living your company values.

How do you keep company values alive? One of the best ways is to ensure you and your senior team live the company values in all you do.

Say you asked for everyone's cooperation to phase out all discretionary spending after announcing drastic cost-cutting measures. But a few days later, workers notice you getting a pricey company laptop when a less expensive one would do. Words – without evidence that the words are being applied – reinforce people's skepticism about the believability of organizational values. 

10. Understand the different types of organizational values – and analyze them to see where yours fall.

Companies often mistake core values (who we are) with aspirational values (who we want to be). Continuously talking about aspirational values as though they are the actual values is a surefire way to fuel employee cynicism.

In the Harvard Business Review article "Make Your Values Mean Something," Patrick M. Lencioni adds two other categories of values: permission-to-play (the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee) and accidental (which happen spontaneously within a team and take hold over time.) Sift through your company values and ask yourself which ones are the true core values.

Pay particular attention to accidental values and their impact on your core values. These values represent some shared workplace behaviors and beliefs that are unintentional, which means they are not cultivated by leadership but have become de facto company values. 

Accidental values can be advantageous but can also hurt the culture. For example, say one of your core values is "respect for all," but your company follows a quiet practice of rewarding certain employees even though they are tough on subordinates simply because they are high sales performers. Before long, you have on your hands an accidental value that prioritizes high performance above all and signals to everyone that "elite" employees can disregard your core value of "respect for all." That's a surefire way to erode the credibility of your company values. 

11. Reward and recognize employees who embody company core values.

A key component in implementing and reinforcing company values is rewarding those employees who exemplify the values in their day-to-day actions. To that end, it pays to reinforce the importance of company values to your company's health.

More than ever before, customers are looking to buy from companies that clearly state their values and prioritize ethical, social, and environmental objectives. Consider showing your people the direct link of core values to attracting and maintaining customers, for example.

What is rewarded gets repeated, so show your appreciation for those employees who embody your company's core values. 

Consider as well setting up a peer recognition program where employees are encouraged to recognize other team members for exemplifying the company's values in their everyday work. 

12. Uphold the values in good times and bad times.

What a company does in challenging times is even more important than what it does when all goes well. 

Do you uphold your core company values even when you're under pressure? For example, let's pretend one of your values is "Quality," and you repeatedly remind employees to deliver quality products and service. But when there's an urgent deadline, and you tell employees to cut corners to get the product out the door, employees get the message that "quality" is mere window dressing and stop taking the values seriously. When this happens, you compromise all the work you did to implement and promote your company values. 

13. Beware of the small infractions.

Poorly implemented values can slowly poison a company's culture and even lead to company failure. Infractions that spiral a company down can often result from a gradual descent into poor judgment. Violations of standards can become standard. 

This concept applies to everyone, no matter the company's size: Small integrity slips have a way of slowly diluting a company culture. Guard your company values by making sure that disrespecting the standards doesn't become the standard behavior.

14. Always show leadership to reinforce your company values.

How do you reinforce the company values? One way you do this is by proactively managing your own behavior. You have total control over how you deal with your employees and customers. Show leadership in everything you do, and you will have improved your corner of the universe. It might even spread to others. 

Embrace and Enforce Your Company Values for Success

True business success isn't made in headlines but is based on a foundation of strong values that guide decision-making, foster a positive company culture and drive exceptional results. Embracing and enforcing company core values is the key to achieving long-term success in today's business landscape.

Explore the importance of core values in achieving business success in the success story of Ben & Jerry's. 

A version of this article was originally published on May 08, 2013. 

Photo: Getty Images