4 tangible ways to bring company core values to life

I generally  see culture as the lived expression of organizational values. As such, an organization's values are key things to consider when trying to build up or transform your company culture.Here are four practical  ideas on how an organization can go about ensuring that its values get off the company website, and into employees' day-to-day operations:

• Review current core values. Re-evaluate your company’s core values to ensure that they are in alignment to the company’s mission and goals. The values could be adjusted with the growth and evolution of the business. Asking feedback from your employees is a sure way of finding out if they are aligned to the values  and is a great way to involve them in the decision making process of the company. You will also get to see patterns in how your employees are perceiving your workplace core values and identify what might need to be changed.
• Celebrate the staff members that are displaying/working according to the organization's new values. This could be as simple as creating a slack channel, and challenging staff members to shout out their colleagues who best represented the orgs' new values on a weekly basis.  Recognizing and rewarding employees.
• Gamify your values - you and your team may have developed great company values, but if nobody is excited about them, they won't get very far.  You could come up with games/activities or challenges related to the company values. Also, don’t think the burden falls solely on HR, feel free to engage members from other departments that can help you come up with these activities!
• Finally, values should be a key feature of your performance management process. If your values are important to you, and to the culture you want to curate, then they should play a critical role in determining who gets hired, fired, or promoted, and ultimately how performance is measured. Additionally, this sends a clear signal to staff about what is truly valued at the organization.

In the end, every organization has a culture, the best ones are able to steer/direct/cultivate the culture's evolution, in a way that links them to the organization's mission.