The Value of Values – Strengthening Your Organization’s Core

Organizational vision and mission statements often get lost in the course of daily operations. It is vital, however, that these remain the key messages that every employee promotes and lives at all times.

Identity is a key fundamental to corporate success. If one were to think about it, every organization in history has been founded on certain values which form the core identity. In a world of mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring, these often get left by the wayside. In the hustle and bustle of routine operations, the alignment towards the vision and goal that founders and management created when they set out to add value to stakeholders through the business, is lost. In a frantic race for the next disruption, the next growth hack or for that matter, the next big transformational exercise, employees often diverge from the common thread that brought them together in the first place.

It is the responsibility of the Talent Managers to instill the culture and mission into the entire workforce, and in this case, even the prospective talent pool and external service providers.

WHAT THE MANAGEMENT WANTS

It’s fairly accurate to say that most organizations set forth their vision and mission statements at inception. These may be slightly altered to accommodate shifting business needs and operations, but core values by themselves, are crafted for business continuity and growth by the founders. As such, leaders want:

• Vision and mission statements to be thoroughly ingrained in the underlying culture of the organization.
• Complete alignment to core strengths, values and ethics of the entire workforce, contractors, and all functional business units within the organizations.
• Consistent adherence to the vision and mission statement of the organization and efficient implementation of any new complements to the existing core mission statements.
• Flexibility in the strategic direction of the organization, competitive advantage while remaining compliant to core business vision and direction laid out by them.
• Responsibility of every CXO towards their own business functions to adhere to growth and operations that revolve around the core strength and value statement of the organization.
• Initiatives that create a holistic work culture based around established vision and mission statements, which in turn align the organization towards a sustainable growth path, reducing any misalignment.

WHAT EMPLOYEES WANT

While the board is at the helm, the employees are the crew and they expect constant communication aligned with what the captain is thinking. Consistent alignment is the key here, and the more the HR facilitates it, the deeper it gets embedded in the organization. At a somewhat intuitive level, employees want:

• Experience

  Employee experience has become a key productivity driver in the modern enterprise. Reinforcement of values and core strengths through every instance of internal communication can act as a crucial motivator and drive home employee experience metrics

• Consistency

  With newer and ever more complex technologies being deployed, consistency of the overarching mission statement of the organization goes missing and this clearly sets the agenda for the modern talent manager. Ensuring that core values permeate through every department, appear in every business communication and across multiple HR touchpoints throughout the employee life cycle.

• Identity & Expression

  A common identity and thread that binds together the workforce is a stronger motivator than you’d think. Employees spend a significant amount of their waking hours at the workplace, most of them anyway, and it is vital that the identity of the workplace and its culture is ingrained in them as an extended identity of themselves.

WHAT TALENT MANAGERS CAN DO

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, as Drucker very rightly said. The alignment of culture and organizational vision and mission statements for the talent manager is critical and cannot be overstated. In fact, as the workforce gets more distributed and automation comes to play a larger part of the human resources function, industry leaders are evolving to emphasize a simple, holistic and all-pervasive mission statement across internal and external stakeholders, the board and even customers. Talent Management has a greater role to play as the sole connection between the board and the workforce than ever before in history. How are you playing it?