A values-led culture seems to be the holy grail of workplaces, for good reason. Like attracts like. People want to work in organisations that align with their personal values. They want to make a contribution and be part of making an impact. This demonstrates the importance of having clear, well articulated values. 

I work with people across Australia to create great workplaces. This isn’t limited to HR professionals. Regardless of whether their official title is business owner, CEO or if they’re a member of the leadership team, the role of HR, at the heart of things, is a way to address the opportunities and challenges of workplaces, with an end goal of an engaged, dedicated and high performing workforce. Embedded, meaningful values are one way to build a culture that enables high performance. Let me explain:

Research tells us that the values an individual brings to their role, and how these align to organisational values has an indisputable influence on their reported job satisfaction and motivation, which in turn impacts on performance. There’s a lot of commentary about values and people, but I find a lot of it focuses on the less tangible values such as creativity and respect. The more extrinsic values are sometimes absent from these discussions. These are values such as salary, flexible work arrangements and potential for career advancement. Extrinsic and intrinsic values are both important and necessary to individuals as well as to their broader organisation, which leads me to my next point.

While employees by definition work within a collective, it’s important to align company culture with individual values – of course, not every individual, this isn’t feasible nor optimal, but a shared set of values isn’t an impossible task to create. Like any cultural change, it needs to start at the top and then cascade down. There’s no point having beautifully articulated values on the wall if leadership behaves in a way that’s contradictory to the values. In fact, not only is it pointless, a scenario like that is actively damaging to culture and to people’s level of engagement and motivation. 

This is why clarifying values is often one of the first steps in my work with clients who come to me knowing their culture could be stronger but need some expert support to lock down some principles and some actions. For example, to create that cascade experience, we might need to work with the leadership team to create a charter of expected behaviour, tools and language that turns values from concepts into lived experience in the workplace. When leaders embody and role model values through their executive presence they create stick-ability, and provide a template for expected behaviour and actions.  

Another way to align people’s attitudes and behaviours to their values is by tweaking the organisation’s performance review process to have values as integral parts to be completed, considered or addressed. This means people are reviewed not just on what they do and how they perform against the position description and their goals, but also how they behave. There are plenty of examples from the world of sport where abhorrent behaviour has been ignored because of brilliant on-field performance, however there’s a mountain of evidence that shows the damage of this clear compromise of values to the team, and even to the sport. In a business environment unacceptable is exactly that – unacceptable. On the flipside, a person who exemplifies the organisational values should be celebrated and acknowledged, and the performance review process is often a simple way to do so. 

Values are something I could (and sometimes do!) talk about all day – a quick glance at my blog library of content will show you that they’re something I like to write about too. This is for one reason – I believe that values – individual, organisational, team, brand – are essential to building connection and a sense of belonging. It’s this sense of belonging or togetherness that leads to high performance. If you’d like to tussle around the concept of creating a culture of belonging in your organisation please reach out. I’d love to support you.