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 must implement the values with prospective actions and requisite behaviors rather than open them to interpretation.
Discussed below are some valuable steps that can help organizations to align employee behavior with core values:
1. Define and Communicate Tangible Behaviors that Align with Core Values
2. Hire, Promote, Reward, and Fire Employees based on Core Values
3. ‘Walk the Talk’ across All Levels of the Organization
Organizations need to define the acceptable behaviors and actions that align with the core values.
The senior leadership and HR must consistently and adequately communicate these tangible behaviors on every possible occasion.
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.
Also, the employee rewards and recognition policies should focus on rewarding behaviors that align with the organization’s key values.
The primary responsibility of driving the organization’s core values to the employees lies with the senior management team.
Therefore, the leaders need to ensure that they demonstrate these core values in every decision and action that they take.
They must live these values to ensure employees integrate them into their work lives.
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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