Core values are critical to your company’s mission. They can enhance your company’s ability to perform its mission and achieve longevity. As Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons says, ”I’ve learned that the best companies – the ones that are most competitive and lead their industries decade after decade – put enormous emphasis on their core values and beliefs.”
Managers play a key role in promoting a company’s core values. It is their job to make sure employees know the core values. They must also encourage employees fulfill the values, by teaching them and by embodying them. If you manage according to core values, you will see numerous benefits.
Cultures are built through ritual and repetition. You likely have numerous company events that you organize over the course of the year, as well as daily, weekly, and quarterly rituals. These all contribute to your company culture.
Without core values, though, these are empty rituals. People won’t see the reason why you do what you do, and they may assign their own meanings to them. You may not like the meanings they assign. Company parties become an excuse to get drunk and misbehave. A morning standup becomes management spying on everyone daily. Performance reviews aren’t about finding opportunities for improvement or rewarding progress, it’s just about the potential for a raise.
To make your company culture strong, you should choose events and rituals that build off your core values and make it clear how and why these events are related to your values.
Managing with core values can improve your recruitment. Remember: good recruitment isn’t just about getting warm bodies to fill holes in your organization, it means finding the right people for your company, the ones who are dedicated to your mission and want to forward it.
Recruiting without an emphasis on core values makes your job look just like another way to earn a paycheck. Employees you bring on in this context are more likely to just check in, collect their paycheck, and leave. Emphasizing your core values will attract people who share those values and want to engage with your company on a deeper level. Employees recruited in this context are more likely to give their all because they believe in what you do. They are more likely to put in more effort, to innovate, and to strive for better ways to do their job.
Employee engagement is critical to your organization. Engaged employees have higher productivity, stay longer, and have fewer accidents. Overall, this improves a company’s profitability by 21%. Managing based on your core values can enhance employee engagement.
First, using core values to recruit the right employees will give you people who are more likely to be engaged in your organization. Second, core values provide a critical piece that maintains engagement in your employees over the long term. That’s because core values give your employees the “why” behind their work. When employees don’t have a “why” for their work, it becomes another empty ritual. It’s just something they do eight to five on weekdays to collect a paycheck. This encourages them to do the minimum to get by. Core values give employees good reasons to dedicate themselves to work and do more than the minimum. Employee engagement goes up when people see genuine progress toward the shared cause and feel a reward that is more than monetary.
When the core values of your organization are just window-dressing, it’s hard for your company to maintain unity. People are all dedicated to their own values and missions. Again, this might be making money to pay the mortgage on the house they’re eager to get home to. Even engaged employees can become fractious if they are devoted to different visions of the company, potentially based on their individual goals and ideas.
However, when you make your core values central to your management, people can see the mission and the values that everyone believes in. They will feel a sense of unity from their shared commitment to this mission and values. This becomes a strong tool for resolving conflict in the organization, too. When people have conflicts, you can appeal to the core values to bring them together.
When managers seem to be acting capriciously, employee engagement and conflict can increase. People accuse managers of playing favorites, and they won’t work hard for promotions because they don’t see the system as being fair. People won’t see discipline as a learning opportunity, either, because it looks to them like an arbitrary penalty.
Deploying core values as part of your managerial style can help you create consistency that everyone can see and understand. It gives people a rationale for the decisions you make, and this rationale can, in turn, guide their actions in response to either positive or negative management decisions. This will improve employee happiness and long-term engagement. This can also simplify some hard management decisions by giving you a standard to use.
While managing based on your core values is a critical component of building a strong culture and successful business, many companies struggle with this. If you feel your management team can use some guidance incorporating your core values into their management style, PassioHR can help.
As part of our comprehensive PEO services, we’ve helped many small to medium-sized businesses build a strong culture based on core values. We use our unique Elevated Engagement Plus™ Approach to help your business distill your core values so that your managers can more effectively live them and incorporate them into their daily management style.
We accomplish this by working closely with your leadership team to understand your company’s culture and core values. Then, we’ll help you work with your management team to ensure these values are espoused on a daily basis and reinforced from the top down, allowing all your employees to become more engaged in your values-based company culture.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation.
Full PEO Services creating inspired, successful teams and comprehensive employee engagement.
Get Started