Corporate Values Archives

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on April 21, 2020November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee.

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions.

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels.

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective.

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

Context: the workplace in crisis
Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
Toward the meaningful workplace
Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
Making your workplace more meaningful
“Ambition” is the new “purpose”
“Feelings” are the “values”
“Behavior” are the new “culture”
Making it happen
Going beyond “messages”
A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Why Don’t More Companies Value Their Values?

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

Corporate Values

This question comes up for us often because we’re engaged with brands at an emotional level, not just intellectually or strategically. We’re working hard to connect brands to humans who make lasting emotional decisions a lot faster than they can come to logical ones.

One of the strongest emotional binders for human beings is shared values – they’re the basis of religion, among other things – so it’s logical to conclude that companies with strong brands put a lot of value into their values.

But often, they don’t. More likely, they neglect them for long stretches of time, and then “dust them off” or “update them” when there’s a major management transition or a new ad agency takes over the account. And this is where values suddenly become fungible, something malleable that can take any shape the new boss or new creatives need.

Instead of being a mirror that shows you what your company culture really looks like, values become one of those “you could look like this” simulations that cosmetic surgeons use to sell nips and tucks.

There are excellent return-on-investment reasons to understand values, state them clearly, and socialize them thoroughly. These reasons have nothing to do with nips and tucks, appearances or impressions. The main reason to invest in values is to turn people on emotionally about a company and its work. This goes both for employees inside and everyone else outside.

People joke about value #1 at Google – “Don’t be evil” – but ask yourself honestly whether you subscribe to it or not in your own life. I’m guessing you do. I’m also guessing that this particular value never crossed paths with your current employment on a conscious level.

Once we think of our jobs as doing the opposite of evil, we’re not just going to work anymore. We’re trying to make the world a better place. On purpose. As a matter of business success. Because everyone else at the company is rowing the same boat, in the same direction.

Now take a look outside Google. The criticism of “Don’t be evil” is never about the value. It’s always about whether people believe Google is living up to it or not. So even Google’s customers, critics, and investors are emotionally engaged with the company’s values. You think that can help a stock price go stratospheric?

The other big reason to get corporate values right – nailing them authentically and getting people lit up about them – is figuring out what matters for the long haul, not the next few years or quarters.

We’ve seen companies mount values exercises that didn’t produce hardly any actual values, yet the companies still thought they were effective because they identified some success factors. Of course success factors are good to know, but they’re like figuring out which kind of vehicle is best for a long road trip. You want to get that success factor right as a practical matter, but it doesn’t tell you where you want to go, or fuel the desire (and the vehicle) to get you there.

Values do that.

Values keep companies healthy and happy through recessions, keep them from over-doing it during booms and bubbles, and keep them recruiting the kind of people they need to execute the strategy.

If you want a real ROI on values, consider how they help corporations decide which businesses to stay in and which ones to exit.

We saw one client sell a profitable $10 billion automotive business in order to go into alternative energy, because of its deeply embedded values for bringing the world game-changing innovation. The choice was clear: keep making $100 million a year on auto parts, or build a new business meeting an urgent need for humanity. It was no contest.

Investors could hardly complain, because the company wasn’t going rogue. It wasn’t going green for the sake of appearances or its brand. It was doing what had built value for the company and its stakeholders for decades.

And in the end, that’s the reason for getting values right. We think of them as abstract ideas, but they create physical and monetary value when they’re fully alive in employee hearts and management minds.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Getting Employees to Live Company Values

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou.

The goal of employee engagement is to drive employee attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics in such a way as to improve their productivity, morale, satisfaction, and usefulness within the organization.

However, many companies have struggled with converting their proclaimed values into compelling, work-changing experiences for their employees that reach through to their brand strategy.

Often, the problems have been that the values are typically expressed with meaning-neutral (if not meaningless) corporate-speak, or that the values aren’t of a first-order nature. That is, they don’t touch on what truly constitutes the “good” for people inside and outside the organization.

Getting employees to live company values

As such, employees simply haven’t been able to internalize the values. If asked, they may be able to repeat the values verbatim, but their recitation will not be heartfelt. Furthermore, too often their conscious knowledge of the values does not lead to the desired changes in attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics.

There is a way businesses can get employees to live the company’s values. Ironically, it is by never using the word “values.” Rather, it is by bringing people to the company’s values through feelings.

This is a new way of engaging employees in corporate values. It doesn’t ask employees to buy into potentially bland statements crafted in corporate-speak. Instead, it prompts employees to think about how they want themselves, and others, to be left feeling by the business.

To make this work, the business determines a set of higher-order feelings based on their ambition. These feelings are selected based on their ability to help propel employees in their pursuit of the ambition and their ability to serve as an employee-friendly way of deploying values through employee engagement initiatives.

Engagement built around feelings

The business then engages its employees around these feelings, using them to shape, change, improve, and make more consistent, the employee’s attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics as it drives them forward toward the ambition.

For example, employees can be engaged in a process by which they explore how the business can better make them feel the selected feelings through changes and additions to the company policies and procedures.

At the same time, employees can affect change within by questioning how they, and the policies and procedures they control, can be changed or added to in order to make their superiors, peers, and reports more likely to feel the desired feelings.

By focusing on feelings rather than traditional value statements, a business instantly forges a fresh and new emotional connection with its employees. By using feelings as the platform by which it instills its values, businesses discover a better way to engage their employees and to get them to internalize both the business’ ambition (purpose) and its feelings (values).

This excerpt is the fifth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

To read more about employee engagement activities: Meaningful Workplace: Getting Employees to Respond Positively

Photo credit.

Change How You Think About Values At Your Company

Posted on October 22, 2013December 4, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

“Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of action or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person’s sense of right and wrong or what “ought” to be.” – Wikipedia

Enterprises seek “appropriate” courses of action and outcomes, so they establish and communicate a set of corporate values. But, too many businesses find that employees aren’t sufficiently influenced by these values. In other words, they don’t fully embrace the ideals, they often act in “wrong” ways, and they don’t work together to create what “ought” to be.

We’re not saying values, per se, are wrong. We’re simply making the case that the intent and meaning of a company’s values can be made more relevant and actionable when leadership thinks differently about the way they engage employees.

We help our clients identify a unique Emotional Impact – a set of four positive feelings – that are selected based on their ability to make the company truly matter when experienced by people within and outside the company.

People will only feel this way, and the company will only matter, if everyone in the company shares the same intent, attitude, and behavior, all of which need to embody and reflect the company’s values.

Our belief is that employees will be more involved, creative, and purposeful when they see their task as helping others experience specific feelings. They can easily see how these feelings are rooted in what they believe, how they behave, and the meaningful outcome they and the company seek.

It is challenging to understand the power of this approach in the abstract. However, in working with our clients, we have found it to be a useful way to see how processes, practices, policies, and personal interactions within organizations can be evolved to better evoke specific feelings.

From overarching policy decisions to individual conversations, feelings are a great way to bring corporate values alive and to make your business matter more to people.

Learn more about why mattering matters and how to build a workplace that matters.

Cartoon by Hugh McCleod

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Tag: Corporate Values