Entrepreneurs love to talk about company culture. But unlike hanging hammocks in the office or installing a two-story slide, your company's core values can have a big impact on your bottom line.
Strong core values can drive smart hiring practices, reduce turnover and absenteeism, increase productivity and work quality, help guide decision making, improve customer relationships, and boost employee morale.
The startup phase is the best time to think about core values because it's much easier to make changes early on and ensure all aspects of the business are aligned as you grow. Determining your company's core values will have a big impact on the type of organization your startup becomes, so choose wisely.
When choosing the values on which to build your company, you should take into account the beliefs that many of the most successful companies have in common:
1) Happiness/Passion: Passion for what you do and happiness in the workplace lead to more productive employees, fewer workplace problems, and higher quality of work. Companies that have adopted passion as a core value include Zappos, Coca-Cola and Rackspace.
2) Education: Building a culture that values continuing education means your employees will grow with your organization and deliver better results. Epic offers its employees extensive training and a personal professional development fund.
3) Innovation/Creativity: Innovation is probably the value that will give your company the greatest competitive advantage. When employees are encouraged to innovate, they will come up with breakthrough ideas. Google even has a secret lab dedicated to moonshot ideas like self-driving cars and Google Glass.
4) Transparency: Being genuine and transparent, both internally and externally, is a principle that is growing in popularity. If anything about your company isn't genuine—from your business partnerships to your marketing campaigns—your customers will notice. Chipotle has distinguished itself among its fast-casual counterparts by providing comprehensive information about the origin of its ingredients. Buffer takes transparency to the extreme by publishing the salaries of its employees.
5) Excellent customer service: Your customer satisfaction will make or break your business, so a customer-centric approach should be at the heart of everything you do. Southwest Airlines, Zappos, Whole Foods, and American Express embrace customer service as one of their core values.
6) Give back: When your company does something to benefit others, employees feel good working with you and your customers feel good buying your products. TOMS, Salesforce.com and Warby Parker embrace social responsibility as a fundamental part of their business.
Simply having core values is not enough to obtain the benefits they offer. You have to work to integrate them into your culture. Keep these tips in mind when building them:
Identify shared values. Gather core values from your company leaders, founding team, or employees. (Zappos, for example, sent an email to employees asking about the values they wanted to live by.) You and your co-founder can determine together which values overlap so you can choose the most important ones for your company.
Test your commitment to your values. Core values are meaningless unless you are willing to hire, fire, and change policies based on these values.
Demonstrate values daily. Living your company's values must start at the top with you, the leader. Core values should affect everything from how you run meetings to how you communicate with customers. If a stock doesn't support your core values, it's time to reevaluate it.
Consult your values in times of confusion. It's easy to stay faithful when everything is sunny, but they are more important when times are tough. In times of crisis, refer to your values to determine the best course of action.
Many parts of your company culture are flexible and don't necessarily affect the work you do every day. However, your values affect absolutely everything. When choosing them, think about the type of people you want to have on your team, the experience your company offers and how you want to feel. Use these attributes to shape your values. They will have an impact on your business for years to come.
