Bring together goals and values
Clear corporate values underpin everything you do as an organisation. They say why you exist as an organisation, how you want to do business and why. They are also an integral part of goal-setting and aligning your employees around your goals. Your goals are a definition of where you want to be and your values are a definition of the behaviours and attitudes that will help you to get there. Bringing goals and values together helps employees understand what is required of them and why.
For example, say one of your goals is to improve your repeat business from 75% of returning customers to 95%, one of your values could be customer-focused. And you can expand on what behaviours make you, as an organisation, customer-focused to make it even more explicit what behaviours employees need to demonstrate and what customers can expect from your organisation.
Working together to achieve goals
When you have a strong set of company core values and employees are bought into those values, you encourage the behaviours, attitudes and competencies that will enable you, as an organisation, to achieve your goals. Values bring everyone together, ensuring the organisation is working as a whole.
Values-driven organisations have a really strong sense of identity, which is also a defining characteristic of successful organisations. Yet, a lot of organisations have employees who are not sure of their company goals or their company core values. A survey by employee engagement specialists Reward Gateway highlighted this problem. Of the 1,500 workers and 750 senior decision-makers it polled, only 25% said they felt completely informed about their employer’s corporate mission and only 32% said they felt informed about the values of their organisation.