Values must be fit for purpose

Whatever your company values are, they must accurately portray your organisation. For example, in a hierarchical organisation such as the armed forces, a value of empowerment simply wouldn’t fit.

We recommend periodically reviewing your values; some suggestions of how to do this can be found below:

• Ask questions about your values in annual or pulse surveys — for example: Do you think people live our values in this organisation?
• Check sites such as Glassdoor and see if reviews match your values
• Regularly ask your employee forums
• Review how often values are used in communications by people other than the Internal Communications team
• Keep an eye on how many people are joining competitors who are likely to be paying similar salaries; if people are going down the road for a small increase, there’s likely to be a problem

Ultimately, we think the acid test for your own commitment to your values is: would you fire a top performer if they didn’t fit in with your values?

Tip on embedding your values

• Display your vision and values in prominent places in your offices — be proud of them
• Ensure they’re name-checked in communications
• Recruit based on your values; ask questions which will indicate if candidates share them, and only employ those that do, even if it means waiting
• Reward people for good performance which ties in with your values; these rewards should be intrinsic.
• Ensure middle management are on-board with the values; Gallup’s analysis shows that the manager alone accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement.

If your values are fit for purpose and people genuinely do hold them dear, then this will boost not only the EX, as people will be facing the same way towards a common goal, but the CX too, as employees will ‘do the right thing’. And EX x CX = BX2 (the overall Brand Experience).