Not Taking Values Seriously
While nearly every company has a set of core values, not every organization takes those values seriously. Sure, core values are splattered all over websites, boardrooms and company lobbies, but far too often, those values don’t make their way into daily corporate life.
In the new study, “Why Company Values Are Falling Short,” Leadership IQ discovered that employee engagement is 88% higher at companies that discuss values every day compared with companies that talk about their values every few years. The study also revealed that only 21% of companies embed their core values into their performance appraisals, but people have 80% higher employee engagement if they do.
It takes a high degree of seriousness about values for an organization to integrate its core values into the nooks and crannies of its daily operations like that. And that’s one big reason why employees tend to be far happier and more engaged at companies that embed their values operationally.
The trick, of course, is discovering whether a company is serious about its values. Every career website will tell you that the company takes its core values seriously; the only way for you to get the truth is to do a bit of probing in your interviews. A yes-or-no question won’t cut it; you’ll need to dig a little deeper and interview the hiring manager about the organization’s core values.
The first question you’ll want to ask is, “Could you tell me how the company assesses how well people are living the corporate values?” Now, given the data from the aforementioned corporate values study, you’re going to get some blank stares when you ask that question. The reality is that far too few companies add their core values into their performance reviews. But when you get that blank stare, it tells you clearly that this is one of the companies that doesn’t add its core values into performance reviews.
From that one data point, you can infer something potentially disturbing about this employer; there could be some brilliant jerks wandering the halls of this organization. If you were the CEO of a company where there are more than a few smart people with bad attitudes, would you want to include core values in annual reviews? Of course not; those bad attitudes would get dinged in every performance review. Instead, if I wanted my brilliant jerks to escape unscathed through their performance reviews, I would only assess their technical skills. Perhaps the core values aren’t embedded into performance reviews out of sloppiness or nascent HR practices and not ill-intent. But it’s certainly not a great sign.
The next question you should ask is, “In what ways does this organization make its core values a part of daily life?” Perhaps values are a part of monthly meetings, or weekly standups, or every quarter the company gives an award to the employee who most embodies the corporate values. What you’re really looking for in the manager’s response is some evidence that this company does something more than displaying its values on a pretty poster in the lobby.
Of course, you can tweak these questions to meet your unique hiring and recruitment scenarios. But the key for you is to ensure that you’re actually hearing real answers about the extent to which the company is, or isn’t, living its values.
