- Include your values graphic on your company’s “about” page.
- Weave values into your jobs portal or applicant tracking system.
- Include a link to information about your values in your online job postings. This is a great tool to get some less desirable applicants to self-select out of your hiring process.
- Discuss in depth your vision, mission and core values during your interviews with candidates. Talk about the importance of the vision and mission and the history behind it.
- Include behavior-based interview questions around your core values in your interviews, to ensure candidates already embody those values personally, before joining your organization.
- Create a slide deck about your core values that can be embedded in social media posts and web pages.
- Create an ebook about your vision, mission and core values that anyone on your site can download, that can be used in social media, and that employees can review as needed.
- Ask employees to create a 30-second video on their phone about why the vision and mission are important to them, and/or how they live the core values every day. String them together into one video, and hold a viewing party. Use them for social media too.
- Use your values as a basis for selecting organizations with which to partner for charitable donations and volunteer hours. When contributing silent auction items to noteworthy causes, choose items that can be easily tied to your values.
- Hold a poster or photo contest related to your values. Ask people to choose photos or design a poster for each value, then hold a vote.
- Creatively display your values, especially in places where customers, partners, job candidates and employees will see them regularly. You could even use your own employees on those posters.
- Plan book club discussions about books that incorporate your core values into their message.
- As part of the ongoing performance process, challenge employees to self-identify how they can better align their own work and behavior to core values.
- Ask each department manager to work with their team to “audit” their own practices, policies and procedures against the vision, mission and values. What changes can they make to realign themselves?
- Invite employees to blog about how they see values represented at the organization from their own perspective.
- Use core values to inspire internal traditions like parties, motivational Monday or throwback Thursday.
- Take a page from the football fan handbook and do spirit days (e.g., people wear your logo colors, paint their faces, etc). Have a contest for who’s the most “spirited” that day.
- Evaluate whether your performance management process appropriately accounts for employees’ embodiment of core values. People should be measured on, and rewarded for, exemplifying them.
- Offer a quarterly prize that recognizes individuals who have done something that specifically reinforces or exemplifies a certain value. Anyone can nominate anyone else.
- Create a peer reward system around your values. When someone exemplifies them, they should be acknowledged or even rewarded.
- Choose a value each month, and during that month, make that value a part of daily staff meetings, fun activities, and training programs.
- At the start of each staff meeting, share a story about a customer you have helped or an incident that occurred that has brought your business one step closer to solving that problem laid out in your vision.
- Ask each department to choose a core value and create a 30-minute training around it. Provide a lunch n’ learn program for each department to deliver their training. (This is more about having fun and keeping the values top of mind than it is about really learning.)
- Ask employees to brainstorm how they can share the core values with new employees when they’re hired on. What steps will they take personally to engrain new hires in the culture?
- Ask each employee to pick a core value and put it in their email signature.
- Choose a value anytime you have an all-staff meeting or company party, for example, and discuss that value, or make it the theme of your party.
- Ask your CEO to send out a weekly email with a note about how living one of the values showed up in a customer story, problem that was solved, or team goal that was achieved.
- Create a business card with the vision, mission and core values on it, and give one to each employee.
- Ask your managers to be on the look out for employees living the values, and encourage them to acknowledge it then and there with a little positive reinforcement.
- Make your vision, mission and core values the deciding factor on everything you do.
30 Ways To Bring Your Core Values To Life
About Catherine Mattice Zundel
Catherine Mattice Zundel, MA, SPHR, SHRM-SCP is President of consulting and training firm, Civility Partners, and has been successfully providing programs in workplace bullying and building positive workplaces since 2007. Her clients include Fortune 500’s, the military, several universities and hospitals, government agencies, small businesses and nonprofits. She has published in a variety of trade magazines and has appeared several times on NPR, FOX, NBC, and ABC as an expert, as well as in USA Today, Inc Magazine, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur Magazine, and more. Catherine is Past-President of the Association for Talent Development (ATD), San Diego Chapter and teaches at National University. In his book foreword, Ken Blanchard called her book, BACK OFF! Your Kick-Ass Guide to Ending Bullying at Work, “the most comprehensive and valuable handbook on the topic.” She recently released a second book entitled, SEEKING CIVILITY: How Leaders, Managers and HR Can Create a Workplace Free of Bullying.