Consult Employees when Defining Organizational Values

Do you want to build an organizational culture that is social, supportive, and enhances your company’s brand and environment? To do so, you’ll need to establish a common set of corporate values and guiding principles which span cultural divides.

Do you truly understand the cultural, political, linguistic, and national differences within your organization? With the growth of outsourcing, telecommuting, global migration, and international trade, this is an increasingly challenging task, for small businesses and transnational conglomerates alike.

Only once you understand your internal differences can you begin to develop a single, overarching corporate culture that embraces the shared values of your full team.

However, if you attempt to manage your firm by dictating your organizational values, you will likely fail. The inclusion of employee and manager consultations and inputs is crucial for the creation of an inclusive culture. When values are developed in a decentralized way, responsibility for their maintenance lies with the entire community.

Align Values and Core Competencies

Begin by identifying factors that differentiate your organization from your competitors. What are you company’s core competencies? Are you more fun to work for? Are you more knowledgeable? Do you provide the best service? Are you quickest to bring innovations to market? Whatever sets you apart can be capitalized on and built upon.

However, simply identifying your core competencies and deciding how you want to brand your company is not enough. Michael Hogan at Brandology.com writes, “At the core, your organization’s brand is a reflection of the actions and beliefs of the people who work there. Those actions and beliefs are shaped and directed by the core values they hold. So before you start… ask a question sure to generate some long-term results—Do our core values and our brand align?”

Trying to brand your company in a way that contradicts the values of your team is like trying to swim upstream. It’s both exhausting and dangerous. “Simply, employees cannot deliver on a brand promise that is not tied to their shared day-to-day beliefs and actions, and in failing to do so will negatively impact the expectations of customers drawn to that same promise,” Hogan writes.

Aligning your brand with the values of your team will take communication, time, and effort. Have team leaders identify values and guiding principles that they and their groups feel are most important. A facilitator can supply the representatives with a comprehensive list of core values, and ask employees to select those that most reflect their own. This is more than just a way to easily manage hourly employees. Shared values are central to organizational cohesion and unity.

Communicate Your Values

Once you identify the shared values of your organization’s people, and have learned how they mesh with the company brand, start communicating these values to your people. Reiterate them in any kind of training your company provides, from onboarding, to skills refreshers, to management training. Encourage task ownership to promote loyalty and engage employees. Make sure that in any educational setting, communicating your organizational values takes center stage.

When it comes to building a corporate culture of shared values, it becomes important to hire people who can complement that culture and those values. Identify gaps in your value promotion. Maybe you identified teamwork as an important value, but your employees are struggling to uphold it. When you make a new hire, include interview questions designed to identify candidates who can contribute to the values you need to bolster.

Nothing will happen unless you can foster change. Your whole organization needs to accept and endorse the roadmap. Systems of recognition and reward should reinforce your new values. Performance management systems should never undermine the values for the sake of productivity. Reasonable consequences should be used to hold people accountable for lapses.

If you consult widely, you’ll quickly find yourself at home in a new landscape built around common culture, core competencies, and shared values.

 

TribeHR is the first social HR software that tracks your shared values and aligns them with employee feedback, recognition, and hiring. Learn more right now or get started with a free 60-day trial.

 


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