Are the right values underpinning your hiring, firing and promotions?
By Eliska S. Padilla
February 23, 2021
It’s never a bad time to stand back and look objectively to see if your organization’s aspired values, you know, those that are framed on the wall or on the company website, are the values you are demonstrating. Why is this important? Because over time, the values we ascribe to at the founding of the organization tend to change inadvertently. Values can shift. You can see it in the behavior of your employees and leadership – whether they are walking the walk or just talking the talk. When values erode, cultures get out of balance and before you know it, performance, results, and ultimately the success of the organization erodes as well. So how do you identify this slippery slope?
The best way I’ve seen values described is as a standard for how we evaluate ourselves and others, either positively or negatively. For example, if you say that you value customer service, then a coworker that has excellent customer service would be viewed positively, while another who treats customers poorly would be viewed negatively. Teammates who exemplify excellent customer service would receive recognition, rewards, and promotions; those who don’t practice excellent customer service should be expected to change. When a person doesn’t act in accordance with the values of excellent customer service, that employee should be held accountable for changing. And if you aren’t stepping in to correct the behavior, the message you are giving is that you don’t really value excellent customer service and the result is an eroding culture
What you do is more important than what you say when it comes to values and culture.
Simply put, monkey see, monkey do. It’s a phrase often used to communicate the nature of how living beings will mimic behavior they observe. Indeed, even at work, our employees’ behaviors will follow what their leaders do, not necessarily what leaders say to do. For instance, let’s say you work for an organization where senior management says they want their employees to enjoy work-life balance, but senior management sends emails after midnight and calls teammates at all hours of the day, night and weekend? This behavior resounds loudly throughout the organization and the front-line employees follow the model of executive leadership. Before you know it, it’s the employees who are available and responsive to their manager’s around the clock that get praised and promoted, and those who work diligently within the confines of standard office hours and prioritize family and personal time while being responsible in executing their duties that are nonetheless passed over for promotions, even put on performance improvement plans or fired. This is when you know the company is experiencing dissonance in the values they aspire to and those that they practice.
How do you effectively perform a reality check? One way is for executive leadership to gather with human resources and identify areas where the values of the organization are not being reflected. Next, consider your organizational processes. Your business values should permeate all of the organizational processes to reinforce the behaviors and attitudes that you desire. When you are interviewing candidates, interview for knowledge, skills, abilities and values. It’s not enough to have a skilled, knowledgeable and able employee, we also need employees who can provide excellent customer service, practice integrity, innovation, and resolve – whatever your values are.
Another place where you should see values is in employment reviews. Employee evaluations should look not only at job performance but also behaviors and attitudes that reflect your organizational values. We recommend that half of the evaluation is based on job performance behavior, and half be based on values-based behavior.
It’s not easy to always match your words with your actions and to actually show a high performer the door because he or she doesn’t meet the organization’s value standard. But sometimes the hardest things to do are the right things. Organizations will often make excuses and hold onto these high performers even though they don’t meet value standards, saying “there’s no time to replace them and start over.” Instead, they just try to make do and hope the behaviors fix themselves. However, the moment we make excuses and keep a person on the payroll who doesn’t demonstrate behaviors congruent with organizational values, is the moment our values are chiseled away. This management decision, which will not be overlooked by other employees, signals the beginning of the end.
So if you want your company’s culture to actually meet with the values aspired to on your walls and website, executive leadership must continually assess how well your organization is hiring, rewarding, promoting, and firing for values and to institutionalize people systems that bridge the gap between aspiration and practice.