I have seen many tech companies obsessively focusing on their technical competencies, forgetting that their underlying competencies and capabilities can help them make their way up the success ladder faster. In a world where competition is rife, it is the core values of your company that can become your differentiator. Whether you are engaging with clients or hiring talent, living your company’s core values can nurture growth, learning, and innovation. Core values are what is important to your business, what you value, and what you stand for. They represent your company’s unique, individual essence.
When you have a weak core values system in place, employee engagement, customer management, and team cohesiveness can become a major source of stress and internal conflict. Bringing your values into action and living them may take a little time, but when you are done with this effort, decision making in times like these becomes easier.
Great company culture and improved employee retention
A positive, productive work culture has great power, and customers want to partner with companies that put their people first. However, it’s not always as easy to define your culture. That’s because culture is intangible; it’s all about how people feel in and about the workplace and the company. So, how you go about capturing that unique feeling as you grow your business and welcome more people on board? By living your core values.
When employees are connected and understand the purpose of their work, they involve themselves in a much productive way. And with better involvement in the workplace comes greater stability that further fuels the growth of the organization and improves employee retention. Each step leads to further success with these outcomes building on each other. If the right talent is hired because of their alignment with your core values, your culture will improve, and that culture will keep your engineers intrinsically motivated to create great experiences for your customers.
Streamlined hiring
There are reasons why core values are becoming the foundation for great hiring. Values-based hiring prioritizes specific values, beliefs, and aspirations when attracting, hiring, and promoting talent. By focusing on specific core ideas, business leaders can build a team of likeminded people or similar personalities for the job. When a new hire’s culture preference aligns with the reality of the organization, they can feel happier in their new role and give their best work.
Improved customer experience
In a people-driven business landscape such as managed IT, customer service is a great tool to differentiate your company from the competition. If values are a core part of your customer service model like ours, it will show up. In a crisis, customers appreciate honesty, transparency, humility, and listening skills. If you can exemplify these things better than your competition, you will end up renewing a lot more service contracts.
Also, core values educate your existing clients and potential customers about what your company is all about, clarifying your brand identity. In today’s competitive business landscape, having a set of unique core values that resonate with customers is definitely a competitive advantage.
Fair business practices – better ethics and code of conduct
All businesses need to wrap themselves in a framework of ethics, values, and objectivity to establish, thrive, and prosper over time. Your company’s core values can help you define how you treat people, giving a structure to your basic work ethics. Having a well-laid set of company core values will keep each and everyone, from top to bottom in the organization, on the right track.
Many businesses often go rogue with regard to their business practices in the desire for more revenue. This puts everyone associated with the company in jeopardy, causing loss of trust and integrity within the organization. This can be kept in check by strongly abiding by core company values.
Well rounded, bias-free performance management
Integrating core company values into your performance reviews could help your company demarcate the desired work expectations and limitations. Bringing in the element of values into the annual review process helps you lay the boundaries of acceptability within your company’s work. Performance reviews centered on a company’s core values seek to analyze in which role an employee would more likely to excel rather than judging performances purely on the binary basis of reward or reprimand.
Final Thought: Your company’s core values can guide you to the right kind of people to hire and even the type of clients to attract. By identifying and living your core values, you can lay the foundation for more grounded and confident leadership within the company. When faced with a complex decision, these values will act as a guide to help you weather any storm.
