Company values define an organization. The types of values you set in place help staff, clients, investors, and even yourself understand what direction your company is headed. Providing strong values will establish a culture that makes and keeps everyone happy.
In a 2015 Industry Ranking Report, employees in the Construction and Facilities Services ranked the highest in happiness over all other industries. Their responses included things like “One of the most satisfying things about working here is the close alignment of the company values to my own. That my peers overwhelmingly share the same values is icing on the cake.” Another worker shared, “I share the values of the company in my personal life. That is one of the things that make it very easy to love working here.”
There are a lot of factors that contribute to an employee’s happiness and engagement at work, but sharing individual and company values is a big part. When an employee is feeling dissatisfied with their work, the values they don’t share with the company will become sources of growing problems. In the survey, workers from lower ranked industries stated their reasons as, “I value quality and work ethic where it seems all that matters here is the hours,” and “I think that the company’s values are, at times, confused. The practice doesn’t always match what is preached. A lot is said about integrity, decency, [and] professionalism but this is not always visible in [the] day to day working practice.”
Finding a way of making a company’s values align with the employees values can be difficult. Everyone will have their personal values, but when they are unhappy with the job, their values will contradict instead of compliment company values.
Research shows that employees need to feel a connection with their work and those around them. Stanford neuroscientist Jamil Zaki studied brain reactions to positive and negative experiences. Zaki would inform his participants that their opinions were the same as their group. Their brain activity would show a reward response. The opposite would happen when he inform the participants that their views were against the rest of the group. Those participants would then make an effort to be more like the group to establish a stronger social connection.
While it is not your responsibility as a company to conform to your employees’ demands, it is your responsibility to take an active role in building an organization with values that work for everyone. Making the values very clear to your team and enforcing those values on a daily basis are essential. Ask for feedback and input from your team to find out what values they respect so that you can better understand what everyone needs to be engaged and to get everyone on board with the team’s values.
Whichever values you pick out, keep the list short. Having ten or more values will make it difficult to focus on and remember. Narrow the list down to four or five of the most important so that you can place the needed importance on them. Five strong possible values that some of the most successful companies use are: integrity, diligence, accountability, perseverance, and discipline. These values can be made into sentences to clarify or center the focus onto a particular point like customer satisfaction or teamwork. An example could be, “We value being accountable to our team in order to promote strong communications and relationships,” or “We uphold credibility by making sure our actions always match our words.”
Once you have strong values in place and are enforcing them daily, it is important that when you hire new employees, that they already have a commonality with your organization’s values. Hiring employees that do not share any of your values will destroy all the hard work you have put into building a strong, successful, and unified team.
Aligning your company and employee values will benefit both parties in the long-run. Having employees that are satisfied with their job improves productivity and retention. No company wants to have a workforce that finds no satisfaction from their job, because it will only fester into a toxic environment that will affect all the employees.
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