The most enviable company cultures don’t just come about accidentally; they’re intentionally designed to be high-performing and productive. If you look closely, you’ll find that success actually lies in how well the values set by management are translated into practice, team-wide.
What Makes An Exceptional Work Culture?
The most impactful company cultures are shaped by two things working in tandem: values and practice.
Values are the fundamental principles that guide the attitudes and actions of everyone in a company. These should always support the company’s raison d’être and show insiders and onlookers alike how you manifest your mission into reality.
Values only matter if they’re embodied by your team. Otherwise, they’re just embellishments that make your company look good on paper.
Practices are specific actions that are taken to concretize your commitment to your values. These take shape in the form of institutionalized policies, traditions, and processes. Aligning a company’s practices with its values helps ensure that teams are adhering to the professional standards set by management.
Companies are stronger when all team members are able to live out their organization’s values, from C-level to rank-and-file.
Choosing Your Values
There’s a reason why values shouldn’t be chosen at random: these serve as the pillars from where all actions should stem from. Identifying and committing to good values is crucial for all companies, because when you claim a core value and fail to live up to it, it may signal cultural discord between the internal stakeholders.
Your company’s values will also determine who applies for jobs that you create. Forbes reports that company culture and values are so important to the millennial workforce that company value-systems have become a selling point for prospective talent.
Here are some steps you can take to define your own company’s values:
- Start with reviewing your mission. Go back to the purpose of your organization. What problem are you solving? Who are you solving it for? What opportunities do you see? Turn your mission into specific values by identifying what a person must believe in order for them to achieve this mission.
- Capture your core values in writing. Summarize these beliefs into one word or short phrase. Use language that’s easy to understand. People outside your organization should easily be able to read and understand your core values.
- Make them available and transparent. It should be common practice to have core values listed in your employee handbook or company website. This has to be on the agenda when you onboard new employees or when you pitch to new clients. They must be made readily available so that people know what standards to judge you by.
Putting Values Into Practice
Practicing what you preach will show your employees and customers that you’re serious about upholding the values you set. You can plot your action plan easily using our Values-to-Policies (VTP) Framework.
The VTP Framework allows you to visualize your company’s values and determine how these can be adapted into policies for your employees.
Pro tip: you can also use this framework to create features or new products for your customers!
Here’s an example of the framework as it’s used here at Advance:
| Value What are your core beliefs? | Practice How are your core beliefs exhibited in the workplace? | Company Policy or Benefit What specific policies or benefits are available to support these practices? | |
| Simplicity | Making internal processes and developments straightforward and transparent. | Monthly Town Hall meetings; orientation for new hires. | |
| Ingenuity | Continuous self-development and improvement. | Training and conference allowance; book and online course subsidies. | |
| Sharing new and interesting information with the team. | Incentives for team members to lead monthly learning sessions on various topics. | ||
| Basing employee performance on output and not attendance. | Work-from-home policies and flexi-time schedules. | ||
| Customer-centricity | Always getting feedback from teammates. | Communication channels open 24/7; regular alignment meetings. | |
| Encouraging everyone’s holistic well-being while promoting financial literacy. | Offering Advance’s convenient salary advance benefits and financial wellness seminars on top of the usual compensation package. |
Start by laying your values out one by one in the first column of the table. Next, figure out how you want these values to be put into practice by identifying habits that should be the norm in your workplace. Lastly, give examples of policies or benefits already being offered that help encourage these practices.
If you’re lacking answers, that’s okay! Part of the exercise is finding the inconsistencies with your operations and making it work better for your team.
It would be best to go through this exercise with a group comprised of people from every job rank possible. When people feel they have a stake in the culture you’re trying to create, they’re more likely to uphold your values in their day-to-day routines and influence others to do the same.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
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