In todayโs professional landscape, 51% of workers are actively looking to leave their current jobs and 73% are open to hearing about new opportunities, which means itโs more important than ever to engage your workforce if you want to win the talent warโand that includes keeping the talent already within the walls of your organization.
A key element to engaging your workforce is ensuring strength of culture through your company core values. Todayโs workforce wants to work somewhere with strong moral fiber. They want to be filled with a sense of purpose beyond their projects and daily tasks. In the current talent landscape, candidates consider core values when vetting organizations. They want to know if they exist, what they are, how they are encouraged, shared, and promoted, and ultimately if they are truly part of your companyโs DNA. If you do core values well, youโre guaranteed a more engaged and productive workforce.
- 80% of employees feel more engaged when their work is consistent with the core values and mission of their organization (IBM).
- 93% of workers at companies with recognition programs tied to core values agree the work they do has meaning and purpose (Globoforce).
Needless to say, core values are important. But you canโt just have them, you have to live them.
First Things First, Identify Your Core Values
At Element Three, our core values serve as the fundamental beliefs that guide our behaviors and decisions as an organization. Each core value was intentionally crafted to serve a unique purpose based on pivotal learning moments from the early days of Element Three. The history behind our core values makes them individually authentic and collectively powerful. Despite the evolution of the agency, our values have remained static and relevant since their inception because the decisions we make as a company are grounded in our core values.
E3 Core Values
Awesome Comes Standard
Business First
Emotional Intelligence
Stay Curious
Transparency
Creative Swagger
Own Selflessly
Defining core values is another lesson for another day. But assuming youโve identified them for your own organization, the question becomes, โhow do I create space within my organization to recognize, promote, and encourage said values?โ
Living Your Core Values: Stay Curious
While I could go on and on about all of our core values, Iโm going to dive deep into one in particularโStay Curiousโand elaborate on how this value is lived out within the walls of Element Three every day.
Stay Curious: Ask why. Search more. Participate. Create. Donโt ever rest in the belief that you have it all figured outโalways be looking forward to what is next.
Questions are powerful, and if you donโt believe me, Forbes thinks so too. In an article titled The Power of Questions, Forbes contributor Jeff Boss writes, โNothing has such power to cause a complete mental turnaround as that of a question. Questions spark curiosity, curiosity creates ideas and ideas (well, good ones) lead to innovation and dollar signsโideally.โ
At Element Three, employees at every level are encouraged to stay curious. We want folks to challenge the status quo, get to the root cause of an issue, and push others to think differently and dig deeper, all through the power of curiosity and questions.
So how do we ensure our employees embody โStay Curious?โ We infuse it into seemingly small but extremely important parts of our businessโonboarding and peer-to-peer recognition.
Onboarding
As part of our employee onboarding, each new member of the Herd must learn and share the core values with someone in the office during their third week of work. And by the following week, they must recite the values by heart. It is a seemingly simple ask of new employees, but it is something we take seriously. Within your first month at Element Three you need to know our values, because you will only encounter them more and more as you move through the organization.
So, are you bringing your core values into your onboarding experience? Or are you simply listing them out, without any specific action to take?
Another part of our onboarding is to schedule meetings with other E3ers to get to know them better. Youโd better believe theyโre asking questions or that gets really awkward really fast. And finally, every new E3er has to ask Tiffanyโthe president of our agencyโa question.
To live out your core values, you canโt just list themโyou need to find clever or creative ways to have your people practice them. And what better time than when someone is fresh to the organization?
Peer-to-Peer Recognition
Another place that lends itself to your core values is any peer-to-peer recognition program you might have in place.
At E3, we have a peer-to-peer recognition program in place that is meant to educate, encourage, recognize, and reward behaviors that go above and beyond in representing our core values specifically. It provides a simple platform for peers and supervisors to recognize the positive contributions of the E3 Herd. Weโre at about 75 full-time employees currently, and roughly 100 Awesome Blocks (the program name) are awarded each month.
Not only does this keep core values front of mind for employees who honor their peers, but if you can make it visible, others begin to see real examples of the core values lived out in real life (some of which Iโve conveniently included below).
It could be a longtime Creative Director who โis always asking and figuring out how to lead the team and push our clients further and itโs never lost on me how much he cares. Iโm doing my best to learn from his leadership style so I can hopefully be a version of how calm, yet powerful he is.โ
Or it might be a relatively new employee who stepped into a project management role and โhas shown mass amounts of curiosity in her first month at E3โshe is constantly seeking to understand the โwhyโ behind everything we do.โ
Or maybe itโs a Senior Digital Marketing Manager who jumped into a project late in the game to provide some subject matter expertise: โHis ability to question how and why previous programs were built, and then improve upon those things has been huge for our team.โ
Allow a Safe Space for Employees to Practice Core Values
If your core value is to โThink Bigโ or โTake Risks,โ youโd better make sure your team members know itโs okay to fail every once in a while. And if your core value is to โStay Curiousโ (like ours), youโd better give your employees a safe space to ask hard questions.
Hereโs what it looks like for us: every month our organization gets together for a Business Review meeting. One component of the meeting includes a Q&A sessionโanyone from the organization can submit a question, and it will be addressed by the appropriate leader. Questions are all across the board, ranging from โWhat is the meaning of life?โ to โWhich service areas are we pushing right now?โ Seriously.
If your employees fear practicing your core values, theyโll never truly embody them. And as a leader in the organization, you want to help them get there, not scare them away.
Live Your Core Values in All That You Do
In the end, the most simple (and potentially most effective) way to really get buy-in for your core values is to truly live up to them, every day. After all, great leaders donโt just lead with words, they lead by their actions. Show your team what living your core values looks like, and theyโre more likely to follow you. Think about your core values when you make decisions, and practice what you preach. Because if you donโt, itโs unlikely anyone else is going to.