The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Sarah Wilkins and members of the Reverb team. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify.
Sarah Wilkins
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization, from hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins.
So today we wanted to talk about culture and values for your organization. Every organization has a culture, whether it’s intentional or not, and what we want to chat about is how to be intentional about creating your culture. So to start, culture is really how we do things around here. Reaver believes it’s important to create a healthy, inclusive culture from the beginning, so you can have a lasting, positive environment as your team continues to grow. If you’re not doing it from the beginning, you may be going back and correcting things when you’re 50 or 100 people. And so starting when you’re small with setting up an intentional culture of how we do things around here is gonna be really important. So values are really what an organization stands for. Once you can talk about and prioritize the shared values of the team, decision -making becomes so much easier. This will be true for you as an individual and your organization because values really help guide everyone when making difficult decisions.
Our CEO often uses this analogy. Values are like motherhood and apple pie when things are going well. It’s when they get hard is in times of conflicting priorities. And that’s when the rubber hits the road with values. So yeah, once you have your values, they can really serve as an anchor that you can come back to time and time again. It’s important to start identifying your core values and work to integrate them into all your people and business processes. So one way you can go about creating meaningful values is about getting your leaders aligned. So ensure everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goal. It’s really simple but not easy. So values should be really simple to understand and explain, but they’re not always easy to to live by because they’re going to require you to make tough decisions and trade -offs. Example is take the value of hire the best. It sounds really self -evident. Who wouldn’t want to hire the best? But imagine you’re trying to hire 15 engineers as soon as possible, or your product will fall behind schedule. Do you change your hiring standards or risk your schedule slipping? That’s where the rubber hits the road when it comes to values. This is, you know, important with anything and especially with culture and values is to continually repeat and share, you know, the best practice around change management communication is, you know, it takes five to seven times and five to seven different ways for someone to understand and internalize a message. And then finally, you know, meaningful values, you know, have to be measured. Reinforcing company values means measuring how they are lived as part of your people in your HR, your people and culture and your business processes. So they’re not just on mugs or on posters. It’s not going to work. You really need to incorporate it into your processes and some examples how we can do that. And, you know, three steps to drive values alignment would be to, you know, first express them.
So this is, you know, we’ll say talk the talk. Behaviors associated with your values are encouraged through the language used by leaders. And how you can do this is explicitly define and share your values. What do they mean to you? And what do they look like in action? So not just what’s the definition and what’s the word, but as a leader, what does that look like to you in action and tell people that. Incorporate values into verbal and written communications with your team. An example would be share how someone used that value in action. Stories really help bring life to your values. An example I’ve seen is using an all hands and highlighting someone who, who showed a value in action and letting them talk about it. This is so great for recognition, but also really great back to like, what does it really look like to be living this value. The second item would be to model it. So this is like you first start by talking the talk and now you walk the talk. So as a leader, you want to consistently model behavior that’s in line with your values. So this comes through in your decision making processes. And this comes through where, you know, it may not always be easy, but it is in alignment with your values. And the third item is to reinforce. So this is hardwiring the talk and how you can do this or ensuring that your values are ingrained into all of your HR and people and culture processes. So you know, you really need to look at this and this comes down to where you measure it and incorporate it right. So how do you incorporate your values into into your culture and align rewards with the values? So you know, one way to ensure people are following the values is aligning your rewards and recognition with it. You know you want to look for ways to integrate the values into how you hire and hiring that looks like. How are you using your interview process to not just assess skills but also how they align to your values. It’s just as important as the skills that an individual has. you know, incorporate this into your onboarding process. So make sure it’s a clear part of onboarding for your founder or your leaders to talk about the values back to, you know, talking the talk, what do they mean to them? And what does it look like in action? Incorporating into performance, you know, just like with hiring, how are you measuring that an individual is incorporating values into the way that they work and getting the work done, but how they’re doing the work is just as important. And then other areas around training and with compensation, as we mentioned earlier, you know, this is how you can align it to your rewards as well. So I just shared a little bit on how you hardwire the talk or hardwiring values into your processes. But let’s do a deep dive on integrating values into specific, you know, people and HR practices. So first, let’s talk about hiring and how to incorporate that into your hiring process. So it’s really important to identify the attributes and values a successful candidate is going to demonstrate in the role. So don’t forget to make sure your team is displaying those values when they interact with candidates too. That’s just as important as looking for those values within the candidate. And some actionable ways you can integrate values into your hiring process is to, you know, interview for values alignment like we mentioned a moment ago. List your values and assign one or more questions that relate directly to each value and then describe what it looks like when you see that value in action. That can look like, You know, an example would be, you have a collaboration as a value, and maybe you would ask the question about, you know, tell me about a team project that you worked on. What was your role in its success? And then as the interviewer, you would be looking for the value in action by potentially seeing that someone is actively listening and speaking respectfully, acknowledging other team members, that type of thing. And remember, an inclusion tip is just to make sure you don’t fall into the common pitfalls of interviewing for culture fit. It’s, you know, incorrectly prioritizing culture fit can lead to a homogenous working environment that lacks diversity and can play into your unconscious bias. So be really intentional about how you hire for values alignment and not just for culture fit. The next area is around your onboarding. Again, I highlighted a couple areas earlier, but this is the next impression that the new hire has. Their first impression was the hiring and interviewing process, and now it’s onboarding and becoming a member of your team. It’s really critical to continue demonstrating and teaching new hires about your values during the onboarding process. That doesn’t mean just share a list, but explain how you arrived at this set of values and why they’re important to you. A couple actionable ways that you can do this in the onboarding process include having company leaders tell stories about your values.
At Reverb, Mikaela, our CEO and founder, created a video about our values and how we came about them and why they’re important to us. So, and, you know, telling stories about it as well. So that really helps people to understand more. And then, you know, you can have people write down what the values mean to them as well. The next way would be to provide an onboarding mentor or buddy. This can look like, you know, a mentor or buddy sharing more in -depth overviews about the values and conversations about what they look like in action to them. So again, it’s back to the storytelling and hearing what the values mean to different people within the organization. And having kind of that one -on -one connection is not just important from a culture and value standpoint, but from you know an overall integration into the new organization for the employee. And then the third way would be just to establish strong connections early on. It’s really important that new hires, it’s really important to make time for new hires in the first weeks that they’re joining so they can build one -on -one relationships with the team. If you’re not careful, onboarding can be really transactional and focus just on the paperwork, computer setup, logistics, and things like that, which, you know, of course, new hires will be learning their jobs and those details of kind of the transactional items. But it’s important that they also have time to meet the team, see how people interact and learn what kind of behaviors are going to set them up for long term success. And then the last area I’ll do a deep dive on is around performance and total rewards. Again, we mentioned a couple things, but this is a really important area to ensure that you’re reinforcing your values and you’re measuring and rewarding people based on that. If you only pay attention to what someone gets done versus how they do it, you miss an opportunity to reinforce your culture and values. So, a couple, you know, tactical ways to incorporate, you know, integrate your values into your performance management compensation processes. For performance in particular, you know, include questions about your values in the performance assessment. This can look like, you know, what is one value that you feel you really exemplify? What is one value that you’d like to work more on? What have you accomplished and how did you do it? So not just what you did, but back to how did you do it? And how does that relate to the values and the way that we do work? To share on the same things. And then, you know, if you announce promotions, which we do strongly recommend, highlight how the person demonstrates one or more of the values. This really helps emphasize the importance of living by your values as something critical to succeed and grow the organization. And then with total rewards and promotions or total rewards and compensation, set up your compensation process to include how people demonstrate the values in achieving their goals. So if someone is achieving results, but not behaving in line with company values, people are gonna notice and can become cynical, especially if that behavior is rewarded. So it’s important that you reward behavior that matches your values and that you don’t reward behavior that is contrary to your values. The same goes for promotions. Are the people up for promotion achieving results in a way that models your values? If not, promoting them will signal that it doesn’t matter how the work gets done. If a person is great at their job, but leaves, you know, quote bodies in the wake, you have a and you have a culture of respect and kindness, that person needs to change their behavior before they can advance. So this is where we talk about, you know, really the rubber hitting the road and making some tough decisions Especially with you know regards to performance and promotions and rewards If someone isn’t demonstrating the values, but you know, it’s getting their job done and doing it well so signaling that it’s just as important how you do the work as it is getting the work done is is such a big key to ensuring, you know, a great culture and now a couple of our team members wanted to share about reverb value and some other ways to incorporate values into your everyday.
Rebecca Barton
I love our value of flexibility. It’s really been incredibly important to me in the past couple years of my life and where my family’s at, where I am personally at, and it helps me be a better person to everyone in my life and I feel like I show up better at work and I have more empowerment and control over how and when I do things and I’m also feel like I’m more responsible to my team members and to the work that I do and to the clients and customers and our consultants. So I really appreciate that value and I think that we demonstrate it all the time. So it’s always around you and a reminder for you.
Lindsay Foley
Can ensure their company values shine through and all they do are incorporating those values into staff performance reviews and employee check -ins. In addition, you can start celebrating the moments employees act on these values in a Slack channel or email thread. Lastly, be sure to review company values as a team before each meeting or where important decisions need to be made to ensure those values are top of mind and guide the meeting.
Emily Senff
Hi, I’m Emily, Reverbs Practice Director for Leadership Development and coaching. And one Reverb value I’d love to highlight is the power of being exceptional. Our team members are constantly going above and beyond provide stellar service to our clients and support for each other. These folks are so capable in their deliverables and they also bring a level of thoughtfulness, kindness, and true passion to the work that we’re doing. We’re so lucky to be able to work together and to deliver such amazing services and support to our clients.
Sarah Wilkins
Thank you for listening to this episode of Humans Beyond Resources. Visit reverbpeople .com to find free resources, subscribe to our newsletter, and connect with our team. If you haven’t already, subscribe to stay up to date on all of our upcoming episodes. We look forward to having you as part of our community.
