Would you actually consider your company’s work culture as “good”? If not, you’re not alone. In fact, a workplace culture study done by Gallup in 2017 found that only 15% of the world’s workforce is actually engaged at work. That’s terrible. What we’ve found at Hiilite is that by actually incorporating your organizational values into your workplace (and therefore making them more than just PR fluff) you can greatly improve your work culture.
What Are Organizational Values?
Before you start messing around with your company’s work culture, you should know what organizational values actually are. Put simply, they are the guiding principles that provide an organization with purpose and direction and inform both internal and external interactions.
In other words, your organizational values are the traits of how your brand and company as a whole interact with both your employees and your clients or customers. You may have heard referred to as “brand values”, “company values”, or “core values” as well which are all the same thing and can be used interchangeably.
Typically, most businesses will have 3-5 organizational values that define how they do business.
For instance, Lego’s brand values are:
- Imagination
- Fun
- Caring
- Creativity
- Learning
- Quality
Each brand value is broken down one by one on their website where they detail what each of those means to them.
This is what they had to say about quality:
“For us, quality means the challenge of continuous improvement to provide the best play material, the best for children and their development and the best to our community and partners. From a reputation for manufacturing excellence to becoming trusted by all – we believe in quality that speaks for itself and earns us the recommendation of all.”
Whenever we’re crafting a new brand identity for a client, we often recommend revisiting or editing their existing values to make sure they’re still going in the direction they care about for their business.
How Can Good Work Culture Come From Organizational Values?
Yes, your values should also help guide the way you engage with your customers and the way you build your products or services, but they also should be heavily weighted to the way your team is run.
While unique or quirky company values can make for good marketing, if they don’t actually align with how you want to run your business they can be a detriment to you.
Instead, you should create values around both what’s important to your business (quality, transparency, etc.) and the types of values you’d look for in a new hire (inquisitive, caring, trustworthy, and so on).
Once these values are established and your internal and external systems are tuned to these attributes, it’s then good work culture can be cultivated. However, be mindful that good work culture isn’t something that’s going to be instant. Like taking care of your mental health, it’s consistency that matters—not big events or one-off activities.
In other words, even if you have a monthly pizza party, it’s not going to solve the core problem of helping build a positive work culture. People want to see continual effort put in, not just band-aid solutions.
If you need help coming up with organizational values that align with your business, we highly recommend getting the help of professionals. Our Kelowna marketing agency has a dedicated team that understands how to come up with the ideal brand values for your business.
How Do You Build a Good Work Culture From Your Organizational Values?
Good work culture has to start from the top to be successful. Leading by example will make all the difference in people not only being more comfortable but also more encouraged to participate and champion culture if upper management is even doing it.
How you specifically build culture in your workplace is going to depend on your brand values, but a good way to start is to work your values into conversations with your team.
- How are you speaking to them?
- When and what language are you using when speaking to them in not only in-person conversations, but also over emails, and messaging apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams?
- How are memos, and other updates worded and delivered?
Answering all of these questions for yourself and optimizing the answers will also help you to create systems and ways of talking to the team that then will flow into your employee’s conversations themselves and start crafting the foundation of the culture you actually want.
How Do You Maximize Branding From Organizational Values?
Finally, we get to one of the more external ways to leverage your company values. When you create your values, they shouldn’t just live in a document somewhere in your filing system. Your values should drive the way your content is written and designed so that from your website to your weekly meetings they appear everywhere in some way.
This is where it can be a good idea to get help from a local marketing agency to help you craft the right branding and even establish the right branding guidelines to help anyone new coming in to do work on or for your brand.
Overall, to have the best possible work culture it all starts with your company values. By leading through example and living those values every day in your business, you’ll build a positive workplace culture that attracts the exact kind of customers and employees you’re looking for.
