Let’s start this post blog asking, What’s the most important thing for your business? From this question we can start to explore ways to identify your core workplace values that will lead to your employee value proposition that is ultimately key to hiring and retaining your teams.
So, what’s important for the business, is it meeting a project deadline or delivering exceptional work? What’s more important? Once you thoroughly understand of the values that are most important to you and the business, you can better understand and identify others’ values.
Here are 8 other Core Workplace values to consider:
- Integrity – strong ethics
- Is it the best policy right now?
- Are managers fair with there feedback, critical or positive.
- Does your culture allow for this?
- Promise to Customers. Do Customers come first or are you in beta?
- Diversity and Inclusion.
- Learning
- Teamwork
Where to start. Firstly, talk to those you trust the most. Understand their perspective about the workplace values, what’s important to them for example. Work with those team member on the values that they believe are most prevalent to the company right now with top performing and trusted team members, you can assess and change these values as you grow. Document the conversation, then email those finding back to those team members.
Let those team members digest the ideas. Then create another brainstorming session, even bring some other members of the team in and start to cut down some of the options to make perhaps 4-5 core values. You can always merge some of the values together such as Honesty and Integrity and so on.
Once you have these Core values in place, start to understand and perhaps demonstrate these values in every day behaviours. Now ask, how do they make these values come to life? And how can you encourage more of these behaviours? You should now build on engraining those values into each employee and ensure new employees also have these values.
As you move forward with these values, it’s important to talk to each team member ideally one-on-one to get a better idea of their workplace values and do they align with yours, start to coach them to explore beliefs and values, or simply study their behaviour on a regular basis. Team members might say that they value integrity, but then stab there colleague in the back to get ahead (or what they deem to be getting ahead) or someone imagine a team member stays late to help a colleague and the favour is never returned, is that good teamwork. Will division form? Really important everyone aligns and are true to themselves about these values, so its not just lip service. Again these values should be engrained.
Organizational values are as important to team and individual values, but they should all merge. Your companies’ values may be listed in an employee handbook or on an intranet site. I’d get them on the wall. Amazon and Google do a great job with this. The values are everywhere, a constant reminder. You can also identify organizational values by looking at how people work within the company, and by looking at the actions that the organization has taken over the last few years. These values can change and shift as those patterns start to appear and reassess them as needed. These core values should be concrete but no harm adding to them.
Elwood Roberts is a professional staffing business catering to the IT and construction sectors, our teams have helped countless businesses and job seekers over the years. You can see some of our offerings here. If you would like any advice on how to establish your core values, please do not hesitate to get in contact here.