This Is the Year to Bring Your Company Values and Your Team Into Alignment

The cookie exchanges and champagne toasts haven’t quite come to an end, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn't start planning for the New Year. What does 2017 have in store for your business?

As you set New Year’s resolutions for your business, look carefully at your company’s core values. How well are they living out in your daily operations? If you have room for improvement (and many businesses do), it might be time to put together a strategy to try to align your employees’ values with your own. Doing so can spur your success, no matter how you measure it.

Here are a few ways to help get your employees on the same page as your business.

Make Your Values Clear

The first step in aligning your workers’ values with your own is letting everyone know what your values are. Many employees are unaware of the company’s core values. This makes it impossible for them to strive to achieve those values and operate with them in mind every day.

Help your team clearly understand the principles your company was founded by. There are a few ways to do this:

• Hang them in your office.
• Email them out regularly as a friendly reminder.
• Incorporate them into every training or team meeting.

The more often you remind your team of your values, the more you can ingrain them on your team’s heart so they remember them throughout their tenure with your business.

Hold Regular Trainings

Onboarding a new team member usually involves some sort of company education. You’ll likely go through the motions of giving the new person an employee manual with the company’s values, introducing him or her to other members of the team that they'll be working with, and showing them the ropes. But once the onboarding is complete, then what?

Regular trainings offer a tremendous opportunity to continually reengage your team. Not only can you teach new skills while reinforcing the old ones, you can also underline those company values you're trying to share.

Here’s what this looks like. Instead of simply stating your values, underscore their importance by discussing how they fit in with the topic of your training. For example, if your team is going through a training exercise on how to use a new software system and one of your company’s values is exceptional customer service, talk about how the new software system will allow the team to improve customer service.

The goal is to infuse your values into your training so your team can see what it looks like to put them in action in their day-to-day work life.

Cut Out the Negativity

Is one of your values offering exceptional customer service? Or does your company value each employee’s success?

If your team is struggling to keep morale high, it could be that there’s one person who’s draining everyone else. Slowly, they’re eating away at your team’s happiness levels and your business may be paying the price.

It’s time to say goodbye to the one person who repeatedly upsets customers and/or their fellow employees. Ring in the New Year by letting the person (or people) go who are sucking away the positive energy in your workplace.

Hire Smarter

Each new person you bring on should already embody (or show a desire to embody) your company’s values. When you’re interviewing potential candidates, inject a few leading questions to determine whether a person has the traits necessary to align with your desired company culture.

This can be hard to spot, especially when interviewees are giving rehearsed answers, so look carefully. Asking behavior-based questions, such as how the person would handle a specific scenario, can help uncover their true values at work.

Does Your Team Align With Your Values Already?

Chances are, you’ve already got some degree of value alignment among your team members. As we enter 2017, change the lens you use to determine performance. Look carefully at the people who are already operating with your business’s core values in mind and reward them for it. This will start your year off on a positive note and set an example for what you expect for the months ahead.