In most organizations, core values are displayed prominently at the workplace with the belief that they can help in building a strong organizational culture. However, organizations need to take concrete steps to ensure that the organizational core values are converted into tangible employee behaviors.
The core values of an organization help in establishing the moral code that its workforce must abide by. They represent the most important beliefs of an organization and how it is perceived by its customers, employees, and others.
Since employees are representatives of the organization, they must display behavior that is reflective of organizational values.
Also, it sends out a positive message about the organization.
Despite the significance of aligning core values with employee behavior, most organizations fail to take concrete steps for the same.
Generally, organizations just include these values in their website career page and new hire handbooks.
However, to ensure that these values become integral to the organization’s culture and behavior, it is important to implement appropriate strategies.
Organizations that do not promote value-based culture and behavior end up ingraining wrong values in their employees which over time.
Hence, in such organizations, a negative culture developed, based on cutting corners, blame games and operating in a secretive manner.
This, in turn, impacts the behavior of the employees and creates a wrong image of the organization.
To bridge the gap between core values and employee behavior, organizations need to take necessary measures.
They need to shape employee behavior from day one by integrating these values into their HR strategy.
At the same time, they need to develop HR policies so that employees can imbibe these values in their everyday work.
Rather than leaving the values open for interpretation, organizations need to implement the values with prospective actions and requisite behaviors.
Discussed below are some useful steps that can help organizations to align employee behavior with core values:
1. Choose values that are relevant to the organization
2. Hire, promote, reward, and fire employees based on core values
3. Communicate and support the key values
4. Encourage collective enforcement
Core values should be at the heart of every business process. They should make employees feel special about working for the organization.
These values motivate employees to focus on quality and efficiency and develop an attitude of gratitude while interacting with each other or with customers.
Core values should form an integral part of the HR policy of an organization.
What this means is that all decisions including hiring, promotions and even firing should be based on these values.
Hence, adopting such an approach helps employees understand the significance of developing value-based behavior and building a strong organizational culture.
The responsibility of communicating the core values of the organization to the employees lies with the senior management team.
Therefore, they need to ensure that they talk about these values every time they communicate with employees.
Moreover, they need to live these values to ensure that employees integrate them into their work lives.
One effective way to help employees develop behavior based on organizational core values is by rewarding such behaviors.
Employee rewards systems should focus on rewarding behaviors that are in alignment with the key values of the organization.
Hence, acknowledging and appreciating such behavior ensures its collective enforcement across all levels effectively.
Organizations need to develop effective strategies to convert their core values into tangible employee behavior rather than them just being office punchlines. Only then this behavior will drive the work culture and the business results desired by the organization.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank, in leadership roles. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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