5 Keys to Keeping Your Company’s Core Values Alive

In his previous blog post, Business Coach Roberto answered a question about how to define your company’s true core values In this post, he offers advice on how to keep these core values alive, after they’ve been created.

The Powerful Answer — From Business Coach Roberto:

Together with your company’s mission, company values provide a framework that defines the hows and the whys of your company’s operation. Ultimately, they should be the base of each decision made at any level of the organization.

Unfortunately, hoping that your values will be fully embraced by everyone in the company, and people will behave accordingly to the values is just that: a hope. Your company values may sounds great, but you need to be strategic and deliberately plan different ways to make sure they stick and eventually become common practice.

Repeat Your Values Often

Repetition is key to awareness. Having your company values on the wall is a good idea, while only reviewing them once a year is not. Make sure to mention your company values regularly (ideally on a daily basis; at least weekly). We need to hear, read and experience something several times before it can become part of our way of routine. So, any meeting is a perfect occasion to repeat them in different ways (you don’t want to just monotonously read them to your team). For example, during key meetings, you can explain the reasons for making certain business decisions by relating them to one or more company values. By explaining what values drive your choices and actions in a specific situation, you are creating a context for what is important to the company.

Encourage Everyone to Share

Make sure you are not the only one talking about the core values. You want everyone to be accountable to practicing them and sharing stories or describing situations that show how the values were put in place, or could be found.

Acknowledge the Good Stuff

Everyone likes being rewarded for doing well. During weekly and quarterly meetings, make it a routine to have people share the ways they made the values come to life, or situations where the values where violated and they did something to fix it. And then make sure you praise them for their actions because we build our habits much faster when we receive rewards (even if they are just symbolic). You could even create a contest for the best behavior that is a representation of each value. By introducing some fun challenges like this, people will enjoy participating in the process, and they will continually be thinking about and breathing the core values—which is the goal! (By the way, the opposite is also true: make sure you reprimand and correct behaviors that are not aligned with your values).

Use the Values Over the Entire Working Experience

In addition to mentioning them in different ways during meetings, your values should also be used in the following:

To create job posting for each position in your company
During the hiring process (to make sure the candidate understands them, and that he/she is aligned with the culture of your company)
As a guideline to define job descriptions for each position in your company
To build the evaluation grid that’s used during performance appraisals – so you can relate some of the good and bad performance to the fact that the values were either empowered or not

Constantly Improve

Each quarter you can focus on one single value. This incremental approach is especially effective if your company has just begun to implement core values (or revised ones). Ask your team: “What do we need to change, create, and improve to live by and show our company values more?” Collect all the ideas and select one or more initiatives to implement these ideas. This is a simple but powerful way to consistently elevate the way your company values are experienced.

Eventually, by leveraging these five factors, you’ll create an environment that is shaped around your company’s values. This will lead to them being acted on almost automatically. You’ll notice that some positive behaviors will be elicited and reinforced, while other ones, that are not aligned with the company values, will not be tolerated (this works for actions as well as for people). As a result, your team will be much more cohesive, with high morale, less conflicts, more clarity and higher productivity.

And I believe these outcomes are well worth the small investment of energy and time you need in order to keep your core values alive and vibrant.

As Business Coach Roberto Erario mentioned, these are 5 tips for ensuring your company values are properly implemented so that they’re like second-nature for your whole team. A project management software similarly provides a solution that organizes and simplifies your workflow to help you be efficient while sticking to your company’s values. With an all-in-one system, your agency can outline the framework for projects as well as allocate tasks, view real-time job status reports and automate timesheets to jobs. Function Point’s Project Management Software can integrate all the information so you can continue to cultivate creativity at your agency.

Know a friend who would find this helpful? Let them know and share this article! If you have any additional questions on this topic, or need some agency advice, feel free to email Roberto. Comment below if you have questions you would like to submit to Business Coach’s Corner!

Roberto Erario

Business Coach

A former executive in the banking industry, Roberto Erario holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a Master in Corporate and Executive Coaching. He’s a Licensed Business and Life NLP Coach, a Certified Master NLP Practitioner, and he’s been training and coaching executives and business owners in Europe and North America for the last 11 years. Major past clients include the following: Accenture, Siemens, Hilton Hotels, Dun & Bradstreet, Dorchester Group and Verind – Durr Group.