A company’s culture is becoming an increasingly critical criterion for people’s decisions to join, stay, leave, or engage with their roles. And, when it comes to creating a strong company culture, core values are key.
For this reason, it’s so important for business leaders to challenge the way they approach performance management within their company and monitor and provide feedback not only on their employees’ results, but also on how they’re exemplifying the company values.
Integrating core values into your performance management process takes work, which is why business leaders often call-in extra support from HR experts like the team at HR Star to make it happen. But, if you want to try and do it alone, here are our top tips to make integrating core values into your performance management process that little bit easier…
- To be able to judge whether an employee is exemplifying your core company values or not, you need to, you know, actually have core company values. Without clear values, you’re not only missing an opportunity to inspire and engage new and existing employees, but you’re also probably losing business too. If you need extra support setting or refreshing your company values, ask us about HR Star’s People Strategy Session[1] .
- Once you have strong core values in place, you need to clearly communicate these to your employees. Your values should ideally be explained by top-level leadership, with your managers following up with employees to ensure they fully understand what the values represent. It can be helpful to share examples of values-based work behaviours to help illustrate how employees can exemplify your values in the workplace.
- Next, led by example and model your values consistently. Your employees are more likely to watch what you do than listen to what you say. So, reinforce your core values with your own actions, and your employees will be more encouraged to do the same with their own objectives and decisions throughout their day.
- When it comes to giving values-based feedback, measure and provide feedback to employees depending on how their behaviour and actions align with your company’s core values, just as much as you would their results. Key to this is having processes in place to monitor and support the values being lived day-by-day. This could include one-to-ones and performance reviews, using attitude and behaviour frameworks.
Finally, don’t forget to publicly recognise your employees’ performance. Giving praise isn’t a new idea but consider doing so based on how they exemplify your company’s values instead of the results they achieve.
