Establishing & aligning values in a business

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• What are your organisation’s values?

• How do they project what you want to achieve and what it’s like to work in your organisation?

• What personal behaviours relate to each of these values?

Have you ever actually sat down to unpack your organisation’s values? Do terms like honesty, collaboration, customer orientation, accountability, respect and dignity, trust, or independence resonate with you?

Values are a set of guiding principles which influence our judgement, behaviour, and the decisions we make. However, the values people ascribe to themselves are often very different from the values they practise. Anyone can talk the talk, but a person’s true values are expressed through their actions.

An organisation’s values will typically define how employees collaborate (eg team brainstorming sessions); what kind of investments the company will make (eg in it’s people or how it prioritises customer service); and what types of people the company wants to hire and retain (often with a strong focus on employee engagement).

If you don’t define your values, then you can’t articulate them to your employees and if you aren’t clear about your values, then how can anyone else support them?

It’s also important to incorporate values into your recruitment processes – ie attracting and selecting candidates on the basis that their individual values align with those of the organisation by weighting values (such as compassion and integrity) over and above an applicant’s skills and previous experience.

Values become even more important as your business grows. Having clearly defined values allows your teams to be more aligned, increases your employee engagement, strengthens performance, and helps foster responsibility.

While qualifications, skills and experience are much more clear-cut and concrete to identify, it’s not so easy to objectively measure something as seemingly intangible as a person’s values. Order your FREE copy of “Is Your Team Failing or Kicking Goals?” today and book in your FREE consultation to learn how to ensure that all your people develop a sense of belonging and connectedness – to one another and to the organisation itself.

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