Why Core Values are Important in Corporate Culture

The TTA team participated in a health and wellness program that focused on areas of well-being including mind, body, and spirit. According to the Project Wellness Program, “Our core values are our beliefs, our beliefs govern our decisions, our decisions generate our actions, our actions become our behaviors, our behaviors become our habits, and our habits produce our lifestyle.” Simply put, your core values define your life, and in organizations, your core values define your company.

This idea of core values is not only applicable to our personal lives but can, and should, be applied to all organizations. Having a strong and positive company culture is vital to running a business. More than 50% of executives say that corporate culture influences productivity, creativity, profitability, firm value, and growth rates.

Nicolas Schoenlaub, Global HR, Talent Management and Operations Consultant writes, “Core values are what support the vision, shape the culture, and reflect what a company values. They are the essence of the company’s identity – the principles, beliefs, or philosophy of values.”

Identifying your business’s core values and ensuring that they are woven throughout every facet of the organization are crucial pieces to the overall growth, positive culture, and success of your organization.

Let’s look at four reasons establishing core values is vital to your organization:

4 Reasons To Establish Core Values

1. Values Are How You Hire: Hiring for culture fit and alignment of core values can prove to be much more valuable than hiring solely for job-related skills. By hiring based on core values and a culture fit, you are able to ensure that the candidate will work well with the team and be a positive reflection of the brand.

Be sure to promote company values when recruiting and discuss them during the interview process. Ask questions that will help you understand a person’s fit to the culture and answer questions from candidates when they are trying to determine their fit in the organization. Alignment of core values is so important to Millennials and Gen Zs that nearly half have made career decisions based on this aspect.

2. Values Are How You Change Behavior

By having core values that guide behaviors and decisions within your organization, all team members are able to clearly work towards the same goal. There is never a question of what is right and what is wrong because it is clearly defined within your set of core values. Having clearly defined values helps pave the way for a path to success in the future.

Furthermore, employees that feel connected to the core values of an organization produce a higher quality of work and bond with their team in a united sense of purpose to reach common goals.

3. Values Are the Heart of Your Culture

Your organization’s core values become the core of your culture. If you hire and make decisions using your core values as guiding principles, this will shine through in your culture, and in the way, your employees interact with each other and with customers. Without values, the culture of your organization will not have the opportunity to flourish.

4. Values Drive Engagement in Virtual Environments
Remote and hybrid workforces have presented new opportunities and challenges in the last few years. Cultivating culture and reinforcing core values are still important and possible via virtual experiences. Using breakout rooms on Zoom, Slack chats and other online tools are great methods to drive engagement and company culture through a sense of communication and belonging.

Openly discussing the core values will help your organization stay true to your culture. Sharing values with customers, employees, and stakeholders is a method that many companies have used for reinforcement. The accountability this builds is valuable to everyone.

Core Values Unite Teams and Guide Decisions

The importance of values in the workplace cannot be overstated. Companies are stronger and more competitive when everyone is working together under a shared understanding of common beliefs and goals.

Core values truly should be an integral piece of any organizational puzzle. Clearly defined values can significantly help drive decisions that align with your overall goals and create a sense of balance within your organization.

Tune in to the Bring Out the Talent podcast ​​with expert Erin Diehl from Improve It! to learn more about the importance of company values and creating a culture around them.