There must be more to values

A lot of businesses seem to strongly talk about and espouse their organisation's values.

Why do we bother with values for any organisation when there are so many different functions, units, teams and individuals all of whom have their own way of working? Are values just another fad?

Organisational values define the standards that govern the behaviour of individuals. Without them, individuals would be left to pursue behaviours that are in line with their own value systems, and may not be the type of behaviours that the organisation wants to encourage.

The values of an organisation can help to support and reflect the cultural brand of an organisation, outline how work should be completed and provide some collective leadership that encourages common norms of behaviour that will support the achievement of the organisation's business goals.

Values in isolation are not the complete answer, though. They must not be about vague labels that people can interpret in different ways. For them to be useful, they need to be defined and explained in simple terms that let people know what the organisation means by them. If you don't, the organisation has wasted its time and the values will end up being another poster on the wall that people ignore!

To ensure that your organisation has values that have some meaning as to the way it operates, here are some key actions that can make a difference:

1) Communicate the values constantly, both internally and externally.

2) Acknowledge and thank those people who have achieved something that particularly emphasises the values.

3) The values should be explicitly available as a part of the recruitment process so that the individuals know what is expected of them in this respect. With the behaviours associated with the values you can integrate these into most criteria based processes to gauge their "organisational fit". This is particularly vital in this region where there is a lot of expatriate recruitment and a need to ensure that you are recruiting not just expertise but also people who operate in the way that the organisation would want.

4) Ensure that feedback is given to those individuals whose behaviour does not reflect the values of the organisation. If people are allowed to reflect behaviour that contradicts the values, then over time there is a clear danger that these will usurp the desired values.

5) Make sure that all the associated people, programmes and processes that promote behavioural assessment and development are changed or refined to reflect the values and the associated behaviours.

Values frameworks can help significantly to improve the quality of management by promoting what is required from its people. The crucial question to be answered though is that if you are serious about organisational values then you must be rigorous in how they are developed and most importantly how they are implemented across the organisation. They must be a part of the organisation's strategy, otherwise their intrinsic value will never fully materialise.

So why bother then? Values are another way of helping to shape behaviour across your organisation, and behaviour is an integral part of driving performance and business results. Can you leave it to chance? If you do, your competitors can be guaranteed not to!

- Dave Millner is consulting director at Kenexa, EMEA.