A critical part of corporate culture, company values can help with retention of valued employees and make the workplace (digital or physical) a healthier, happier place. But if the only people who understand a company’s values are its executive leadership, what’s the point? If no one on the floor knows what those values are, how do they matter? Here are some ways to ensure that company values trickle down through the whole organization.
Build in Recognitiom
Employees want to have their hard work recognized, and recognition programs are a great way to do this for employees who are supporting the company values. Every organization should have a built-in workflow from company culture and values, to behaviors, and to real-time recognition. These connections enable a company to emphasize its organizational values through recognizing and respecting efforts to meet them.
Visualize Values
Culture deck is a human resources buzzword for a visual representation of an organization’s corporate values, the things most important to its company culture. A culture deck can be as simple and powerful as a well-crafted slide presentation. Or it can look to more innovative and engaging methods, such as Hour One’s AI videos, which use virtual characters in appealing, humanized, and simple-to-create videos.
Easy to consume and understand, a culture deck speaks on a human level to the people watching or reading it. It’s sharable and attractive and positions a company’s key organizational values as the core of its business. If employees can’t engage with, understand, and live an organization’s company values, those values are pointless. And a company can’t blame its employees for not absorbing company values if those values aren’t communicated engagingly and encouraged.
Branding Speaks
A company’s values are important to its employees, but they’re also more than easily parroted statements. They’re a public asset—a key part of how (and why) the organization does business. Companies with high retention rates have public programs and brand messaging that align with their workplace culture and overall values. By making values a living, breathing part of the workplace culture and the [Text Wrapping Break]“face” a company presents to the world, that organization also makes employees feel included and relevant. Because values are a critical part of a business, companies should bring them into its content strategy and into its communications with customers.
Hire With Culture in Mind
What makes people want to work at one workplace among the countless workplaces in the world? Ensuring that values enter the ecosystem from the point of hiring is critical. Again, this can’t be simple lip service: a company that claims to be a people-first organization needs to back that up from the recruitment point forward. Using a culture deck to humanize the employee engagement process can help achieve that goal.
Companies can also keep culture at the forefront of their recruitment, hiring, and retention strategies by following these practices:
- Send personalized, friendly messages to new hires and potential candidates identified by headhunters.
- Interact face-to-face with new hires
- Keep hiring and promotion strategies transparent
- Be honest about benchmarks and tracking that will be expected
- Don’t let annual surveys be the first time a candidate hears about issues or problems
- Ensure that new hires can easily access training materials, tools, people, and the other resources they need to thrive at the organization
- Build a smooth onboarding process that’s rich in the company’s stated values from the start.
Creating company values that really speak to employees starts by bringing those values to life, instead of merely paying lip service to them. A company that cares about employees, listens to them, and makes engaging with its values transparent and simple will soon have one of the healthiest workplaces around.
