“Company culture matters. How management chooses to treat and communicate with its people impacts everything for better or for worse.” – Simon Sinek
So why don’t we plan to make this impact only better? Inculcating company culture and core values from an early stage always goes a long way. This is exactly why many of the successful businesses today, comply with a set of core values that are deeply ingrained in their system. And more so, because introducing these values to new joiners during the onboarding program can create a clear difference between a healthy and an unengaged environment. Such leaders in the corporate world function so as to strive for their vision, mission, and values, thereby building an enviable company and employee culture.
In this blog, we will be talking about the following topics in detail:
What are core values?
Company core values are the essence of a company’s identity. These are the blocks of foundation that support employees’ purpose, guidance, and inspiration throughout their employment term with a company. These values set the right path and direction for the workforce, and reflect what the company stands for, above all. An organization’s core values can also act as powerful tools to help steer difficult decisions. During the first stage of employee lifecycle, i.e., recruitment & onboarding, it is, thus, extremely important to showcase the principles, beliefs, and philosophy of value to the new joiners that an organisation holds. Unlike goals that are ever-changing, core values are unwavering and resolute, unless the business takes a plunge and the decision-makers decide to re-evaluate them.
How to develop company core values?
There are steps that you can follow in order to identify your core values and develop a strong and effective company culture. Some of the key considerations include:
- Conducting a 360-degree survey with the senior leadership and key stakeholders
- Creating a club/team of significant members who can identify and implement core values of the company
- Preparing a consolidated list of company core values and finalising the most accurate ones
- Conducting an open workshop for decision makers to lock the core values
- Organising a sample survey for senior leadership and evaluating how much they can relate to the formulated core values
*7 Most Effective Ways to Use Core Values in Onboarding*
I. Make your core values memorable
It is easier to remember visuals over text. This is why experts highly recommend showing images and videos to the new joiners instead of distributing documents. Secondly, your content must tell a real, engaging story that reflects your connection with the values. Your onboarding strategy can also involve the hires in real-time activities that help them understand your values better. Lastly, prepare clear & concise content and guidelines so that it is simple to grasp the core values and memorize them.
II. Give examples of wins and losses
Before communicating, it is important to incorporate the values in your brand. People love authenticity. So, once the impact of core values is determined, it’s time to give practical examples of what works and what doesn’t work for you. For instance, you can tell the new joiners during onboarding that taking more than two leaves in a month doesn’t work for you. However, you are strictly against over-times and making employees work on non-working days. Doing this defines a clear picture of how employee-centric your work culture is.
III. Couple newbies with high-valued employees
This is the best part of an onboarding program. It can be implemented as a fun activity where the existing employees can be teamed up with the newbies to participate in activities and complete onboarding assignments. Linking each core value to the employee role is another practice that can be adopted here. This process enhances teamwork and enables faster learning among the employees.
IV. Use technology to show the core values in action
In current times, where WFH has become the new normal, organizing virtual onboarding is the safest and most effective way to welcome new employees. You can make use of the latest onboarding and recruitment software to engage newbies through virtual onboarding via video conferencing. Such software also offers features of instant chat to resolve real-time queries and streamlines the access of necessary information for a successful onboarding process.
V. Strategically design onboarding documents
To make sure that the core values are communicated entirely and effectively to the new joiners, structure your onboarding documents in the clearest and most concise way possible. The checklists, detail-filling, signed documents, and other paperwork must be on point. In fact, every official document that you issue to the new hires should speak of your company’s core organizational values.
VI. Perform regular value check-ins post onboarding
The work doesn’t end after you successfully conduct the initial onboarding event. After all the talk, it’s time to evaluate how much the new ones have grasped about your company core values. So, at regular intervals of time, you can schedule value check-ins for the employees to revise and keep a check on the core values.
VII. Create interactive workshops using onboarding software
Once you get confident about the understanding of your employees pertaining to core values, you can start conducting workshops every once in a while to check if they are implementing the same. You can prepare a situation-based questionnaire to assess their level and take feedback for any improvement in the existing culture.
Why are core values important to an organisation?
The importance of company core values is that it is a set of professional living standards that serve as an authentic reflection of a company’s culture. It is extremely crucial to practise core values in current and future times due to the reasons mentioned below:
- For the employees to imbibe the same value and work ethic, there needs to be a framework for core values that flow through the organisation’s ecosystem
- As your workforce goes through any disruption in life, they must be supported by a strong backbone of core values
- Once the new employees are onboarded, a clearly defined list of company core values help them adapt to the culture faster, leaving lesser need for supervision
- Having a purpose provides a central focus for all communications of the company that ultimately gives social marketing a direction and maintains a consistent voice across all channels that provides value to your existence
- Including well-defined core values in the onboarding checklist and communicating them help to evaluate every factor that revolves around the organisational well-being and how well everything stacks up to your value
Just like your personal core values define who you are, a company’s core values ultimately determine a company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny but, for organizations, culture is their fortune. Thus, effectively communicating core values at a personal as well as professional front brings one closer to their end goal.