Does Your Organization Follow the Core Values and Culture You Preach?
Hands-down, company culture matters to your current employees and the ones you hope to hire more than just about anything else. Company culture is that set of core belief systems and the behaviors that drive them. Every company has some kind of culture, whether it’s good, productive, and supportive, or whether it’s bad, unproductive, and destined to drag you down.
Culture is something we all talk about, along with company values, but does your organization both talk the talk and walk the walk? How can your organization make sure you’re following the right set of core values that allow your employees to thrive?
Does Your Organization Follow Your Core Values and Culture?
Start with Your Workforce
If you’re looking to establish core values, first look to your employees to select values that matter to them. If you want them to embrace the culture you’re defining, make sure they have a role in figuring it out. Do you even know what matters to your workforce? If you have established core values, do you feel as if the employees you’re hiring are living up to those metrics?
The idea of core values is a good one. They define what matters to individuals, teams, and the company itself. Why would you exclude your employees from defining these important foundations for your business? To get their buy-in for those core values, they must believe in them from the very start of their tenure with your company. That is the best argument for letting your workforce define those core values from the start.
Hire for Your Core Values
Once you have your core values in place, your culture will begin to emerge. Then you can begin to hire new employees based on their fit with your core values. This reinforces the kind of workforce you’re building and the kind of culture you’re building toward. Your goals are not to just write down core values and forget them but to build them into processes, including employee evaluations and the hiring and orientation process. Your goal, then is to hire not just for technical aptitude but for the soft skills that ensure your new workforce fits the organization’s mission and values as well as the culture.
Live the Core Values
To build a company that lives its core values, you must entrench these guiding principles into everything you do. There has to be a commitment to the “we” that is your culture—and everyone has to make that commitment. You can support your employees in this endeavor by providing growth and learning opportunities that build a stronger culture of learning and continuous improvement. The goal here is to find ways to support your existing employees in their efforts to pursue a positive productive culture. From managers and supervisors to the VPs, your entire leadership team should establish ways to build company culture by supporting organizational core values. This effort will not only engage your team in this pursuit but also potentially help retain them longer-term.
Do You Follow Your Core Values and Culture That You Preach in Your Organization?
Sometimes we know that there are new employees who simply don’t fit the culture you’re trying to build. It happens! But that’s where the Custom Group of Companies can help. We can assist your hiring teams in finding new employees who fit both the job requirements and your culture. Call on us today to see how we can help your business.
