February 7, 2023
By: Abbey Pint
In order to build a strong company culture and achieve your organizational goals, you need to identify and prioritize the values that drive your organization. Before we explain how to begin, you need to understand the importance of this crucial activity.
First, let’s look at why this is so important.
Value identification and communication is the foundation of your company’s culture. It’s the glue that holds everything together and makes people want to come work for you, stay with you, refer others to you and more importantly buy from you.
In fact, we’ve found that companies who prioritize this step have better financial results than those who don’t! Forbes explains that the impact of healthy corporate cultures that value employees, customers and owners produce staggering results in the appreciation of equity value.
Second, your leadership team needs to work together to identify your values.
The values of a company should reflect the core principles that guide decision-making and behaviors. While it may seem obvious, this is an important step because it ensures everyone in your organization understands what’s expected of them and how they can contribute positively toward achieving a common goal.
Your leadership team should be diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and gender; inclusive of different perspectives; committed to creating an environment where people feel valued for their contributions; accountable for delivering results through others’ work as well as their own; transparent about goals and progress toward achieving them.
Third, you need to prioritize your values.
You need to prioritize the values that are most important to your organization, your employees, and your customers. If you have partners or other stakeholders who are invested in the success of your business but not included on this list (such as investors), they should be considered as well.
Prioritization is important because it will help you determine which values are most critical for success and how much time and effort should be spent on each one. The order below is just an example of how you might prioritize these four groups:
- Customers first
- Employees second
- Partners third
- Investors fourth
Finally, you need to create a set of actions that will outline how these values will be implemented and communicated.
For example, if one of your corporate values involves “integrity,” then it might be helpful to establish an Integrity Hotline where employees can report instances of unethical behavior.
Once you’ve established and prioritized your values, you’ll need to create a plan for how they should be communicated within your organization, ensuring everyone knows about them! If possible, post them on company bulletin boards or email them out as part of an all-staff meeting agenda so that everyone is aware of their importance in helping build solid relationships between coworkers and customers alike.
Your organizational culture is built on values and when those values are prioritized and acted on consistently, the organization flourishes.
- Values help define your company. They give your organization a deeper identity that distinguishes it from competitors in the marketplace.
- The foundation of an effective culture is based upon shared beliefs and principles that guide decision-making processes throughout all levels of the company. This includes defining what is most important to you as an enterprise, how you will behave toward others at work (including customers), how work gets done efficiently within teams or departments as well as across functions such as sales, marketing, operations, finance, etc., how decisions are made regarding products and services offered, how rewards/recognition programs tie into employee engagement initiatives, and the list goes on…
Conclusion
Your values should be clear and consistent across your organization. They should be prioritized and actionable, meaning they can be implemented with little difficulty. When this happens, the organization flourishes and its impact can multiply.
So what are our values at OGx?
Read about them here.
