1. Core values must be actively integrated into employee behavior through HR strategies rather than just being displayed on posters or mentioned in handbooks.
2. Aligning behavior with core values requires relevant values and making hiring, promotion, and reward decisions based on these values.
3. Communication and modeling of core values by senior management are essential for employees to internalize and reflect them in their daily work.
4. Collective enforcement, including rewarding value-based behaviors, helps effectively embed these core values into the organizational culture.
In most organizations, core values are prominently displayed at the workplace, believing they can help build a solid organizational culture. However, organizations must take concrete steps to ensure these 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 reflects 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 include these values in their website career page and new hire handbooks.
However, appropriate strategies must be implemented to ensure these values become integral to the organization’s culture and behavior.
Organizations that do not promote value-based culture and behavior end up ingraining wrong values in their employees which over time.
Hence, a negative culture developed in such organizations based on cutting corners, playing blame games, and operating secretively.
This, in turn, impacts the behavior of the employees and creates a wrong image of the organization.
Organizations must take necessary measures to bridge the gap between core values and employee behavior.
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 that allow employees to imbibe these values in their everyday work.
Organizations need to implement the values with prospective actions and requisite behaviors rather than leaving them open to interpretation.
Discussed below are some valuable 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 fundamental 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 an organization’s HR policy.
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 solid organizational culture.
The responsibility of communicating the organization’s core values 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 must live these values to ensure 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 effectively ensures its collective enforcement across all levels.
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 leadership roles at companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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