Employees who understand, appreciate, and identify with a company’s values more readily engage in their work for and their commitment to the company. I/O/W, people work for much more than the paycheck. They work with greater involvement the more they and the company’s values are aligned.
However, the company that knows its values and assumes the
employees know the values may miss a number of engagement enhancement opportunities.
Here are a few ways your organization can ensure the values awareness that stimulates employee engagement:
- Integrate discussion of “what the company stands for” into everyday conversations, everyday situations, everyday applications. (Work this into informal conversations.)
- Invite employees to relate what they do, successes they create, to “our company’s overall purpose.” (Use this as part of a feedback or evaluation session.)
- Have employees share their “what we mean to the community (or the customer or the employee or ...)” ideas. (Begin a staff meeting with this as an agenda warm-up.)
- Encourage brief newsletter articles by employees about how their work relates to the company’s purpose and intent. (Let them write freely; you do the editing.)
I'm sure you notice the relevance of communication to each suggestion. The trick is not to assume the values and purposes of the company are known. The key is to keep them ever-current in the front of employees' minds.
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