How to boost team engagement using your company values
Firstly, why are values important for a startup?
Simply put, people seek to work in environments that align with their goals, motivations, and behaviours, all of which stem from their values. When your values align with the values of your companies you feel motivated and set up for success. Having consistency between your values and actions in the workplace is rewarding as it allows you to be authentically yourself. If there is a values mismatch, work can very quickly become energetically draining for either yourself or the people you work with. Yet only 27% of people believe in their organisation's values and 90% of people would take a pay cut to work in a more meaningful role. Understanding your own and your team members’ values and how to align these with work reduces turnover, which typically costs companies as high as 60% of the employees’ yearly salary.
What are values?
Values at the most basic level convey what is important to each of us in our lives. Every person holds multiple values with varying degrees of importance. Values can range from topics such as achievement and power, to conformity and security, and they are relatively stable once a person hits adulthood. They are a motivating factor in your life and are representative of your goals. An example of this may be if achievement is very important to you, you will likely strive for promotions in your career to feel like you are progressing.
How can you use values to create a inclusive, high-performing culture?
Creating a company culture that celebrates diversity and where people are included no matter what culture, gender, age, socio-economic background, personality etc. is key to creating a high-performing and sustainable business. Start-ups that have an inclusive company culture outperform those that don’t when it comes to engagement levels, performance and shareholder value. This is because diversity and inclusion are key to creating creative, productive, and innovative teams. Diversity leads to better decision-making as the variety of backgrounds and values allow for multiple perspectives. With a diverse and inclusive company culture you are able to attract and retain the best talent while increasing employee satisfaction.
Here are our Top 4 Tips for Founders on how to boost engagement through values
1. Understand your personal values It all starts with leadership. Founders need to have self-awareness of their personal values to know what culture they ‘realistically’ create vs. what aspects of their culture will be more aspirational. Too many times founders create company values that they fail to role-model themselves as they don’t come naturally to them. Aligning your startups’ company values to your own and your co-founder(s)’ core values creates a mentality of “practice what you preach.”
2. Understand your team members’ values Include your employees’ personal values when it comes to defining your company values so your people feel represented and valued themselves, while also placing focus on the founders personal and professional goals.
3. Focus on creating an authentic team environment where employees can express themselves and speak openly. Practice active listening and playing on your people’s strengths so that they feel comfortable showing more of themselves and bringing their full energy to their work.
4. Use values psychometrics to hire talent Too often, start-ups only implement their company values during on-boarding but not recruitment. Values or ‘Culture’ interviews are often not reliable as they are easily fakable. If they do implement their values, it’s often during ‘culture interviews’ that are not reliable, consistent of scientific. The best way to avoid that is by implementing scientifically validated values psychometrics. It saves you time and money interviewing candidates that won’t thrive in your company culture no matter how much training and coaching you invest in.
Our research on core values in startups
There are some universal and inclusive ideas that we have found from a sample of 200 respondents. After being asked what is most important to them at work, the TOP 5 answers that emerged were:
Being given new challenges
Seeking out different things to do
Staying true to their own values
Thinking independently
Being open and honest about their feelings
These responses indicate people’s desire to be their authentic selves at work in alignment with their values, while having the freedom to explore new thoughts and ideas. This comes down to the motivating values of authenticity and independence.
At CAIA these ideas are put into action through the company values as set by our founder and CEO, Lara Menke. CAIA seeks to live the values of joy, compassion & passion and employees are encouraged to explore their ideas and what drives them while supporting one another. These values encourage an inclusive and collective environment where employees can define their own value alignment as they are given room to grow and freedom to think. For me, these company values have allowed me to find my own joy, compassion, and passion in the work I do. Helping to bring diversity to the workplace is something I am very passionate about and I have found that by creating inclusive cultures through my work I am able to live out the values that CAIA preaches.
Want to go deeper and define your company values in a scientific way?
We offer Values Psychometrics and Values Deep Dive Workshops where you will receive
Your Start-ups’ Values Profile
Crystal clear, scientific, measurable definitions of your startup values and the behaviours that align and misalign with them
Custom Recruitment, On-Boarding and Performance Management Guide tailored to your startup values
Curious? Get in touch by clicking below! We’d love to hear from you!