How visible are your organisational values?

Are your organisational values visible through your team?

In life, it is our behaviours and values that define us. It should not be any different within the workplace. On a day to day basis your shared organisational values should be clearly identifiable through their embodiment of the aligning actions and behaviours. These make up who you are and what your organisations stands for if applied effectively. Through this your team are able to deliver your brands promises to your clients.

Values

Your organisational values should be unique, truly representing what you and your product or service stand for. You want them to be powerful, motivational, authentic and simple to grasp by both your team and your clients.

These values set the tone for the companies’ culture, identifying what your team and the organisation as whole care about. Hence why it is so important that each individual feel that their values align with these. When this is the case, everyone has a common purpose and is working together for the greater good of the organisation.

When values are out of alignment, people work towards different goals, with different intentions, and with different outcomes. This is damaging to work relationships, productivity, job satisfaction, creative potential and profitability.

ACTIONABLE TIP: Involve your employees in creating your organisational values. If they already exist, get the team in a room and uncover what everyone truly thinks of the current values. If needed, give them a face lift. At the end of the day it is your employees who embody these values so there is no point of having values that they do not know, understand or agree with.

Behaviours

Your behaviours are shown through the practical application of your organisational values, evident through the team’s day to day actions. More common than not values are broad; behaviours are where you can nail the detail of exactly what you expect your people to do.

Your organisational values and linked behaviours should come together to create a clear framework that demonstrates how they are aligned. This framework can then be utilised to create clear objectives to hold your team accountable. The values, behaviours and objectives should then be aligned with your performance management system in order to reward stand-out behaviour, as well as, highlighting when actions may not reflect the companies’ ethics.

The agreed behaviours in your company give your team a clear and precise way to act, a reference when faced with a tricky situation and an easy way to identify instances that are deserving of reward and recognition. This is the simplest way to take the organisational values off the office wall and place them within your teams’ actions.

ACTIONABLE TIP: If you do not already have your organisational values aligned to behaviours, get your team (or core team) into a room and go through each value, deciding as a group what behaviour or behaviours best reflects each value. If you do not have organisational values, ask each individual in your organisation to come up with what they feel are the top five most important behaviours within your workplace, tally these up and choose your Top Five Agreed Behaviours. Put these behaviours where they are visible or come up with a creative way to memorise them.

Now it is time celebrate what sets you apart, the unique set of values and the behaviours that your organisation embodies. Through this you will create a sense of unity, which in turn will  build an engaged team and positive  company culture. Remember, your team want to do the right thing by the organisation, it is human nature. Utilising these values and behaviours allow them to clearly see what the ‘right thing’ is in your organisation and then applaud them when demonstrating this. More and more people will come to see what ‘good’ looks like and you will create the foundation for an authentic rewards and recognition approach.

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