At the moment, we are seeing a real difference between Employers who have a strong values driven business and those who don’t. 

Those who do, staff have been working together and supporting each other during these crazy times, putting their hand up asking what they can do to help and employers have been doing everything they can to keep their team employed, engaged and connected. 

Those who don’t, are struggling to get team members back, there is conflict between team members and/or with the organisation, there are constant ‘smart’ / ‘off the cuff’ remarks made by team members looking for everything the business is doing wrong rather than recognising anything they are doing right. 

So, are values important? 

The answer is absolutely yes. Value sand culture are inextricably linked. 

Values ultimately provide the foundations of success of an organisation and dictate success and ultimately non-success factors. 

For that reason, we see some companies with great Values but they do not clearly have ‘non values’ defined. While they can be implied ie generally the opposite of the value or not doing the value, actually really clearly articulating acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in your business is super powerful in setting the tone of your organisation and spelling out who will be a fit and who will not be a fit. Then, employees have a choice, do they want to sign up to that or not? 

When values are set correctly they become the basis of activity within your organisation.

Not only in relation to people related areas like recruitment, induction, performance management, promotion and so on but also wider areas like decision making, marketing and branding. 

They all need to be consistent and the more lived they are inside your organisation, the stronger the culture you will have. They should be linked into everything.

Your values however are only beneficial if they lived by everyone. By way of an exercise, use this as an opportunity to revisit your values and see, do they really reflect what your organisation values? Secondly, do your team know and connect to them? Lastly, do all of your processes reflect your values? 

And one for Employees, ask yourself, do you honestly fit with the organisation values, do they excite you and is that something that you want to be part of? Living the organisation values are just as important as achieving your day to day requirements.

Here is to building strong value based businesses!