How Recognition Reinforces Your Company’s Core Values

Recognize This! – A social recognition solution aligned to core values helps ensure that those values are lived by all employees and actively managed by leaders.

Have you thought about where the core values at your company came from?

In all probability, they were developed as a way to successfully drive a specific culture and achieve organizational success. A senior leadership team spent a lot of time thinking through all of those relationships and what they wanted the company to be.

Far from a straightforward task, developing core values can be challenging. It all comes down to ensuring the right balance between aspirations and reality of how work gets done. As I wrote in a recent post on the Compensation Cafe, core values can often fall short of the goals for which they were developed.

This is especially true when “those core values aren’t embedded in the everyday experience of work, when they are unrelated to what drives success for the organization, or both.”

As I write in the full post, there are two ways that social recognition, when aligned to core values, can help avoid these problems and ultimately increase the effectiveness of the organization.

First, recognition allows colleagues to recognize each other on the basis of living core values through daily behavior and examples of positive performance. It takes advantage of top-down as well as bottom-up dynamics to spread an understanding of what the core values mean to the organization.

Second, social recognition provides a valuable feedback mechanism that allows leaders to actively manage and improve how core values are being lived. The data created by recognition moments can provide leaders and managers with insights into which core values are being recognized, how often, and how their definition may change over time or across locations.

Social recognition provides a way for companies to both ensure that their core values are being lived, and that they contribute to the success of the organization.

Does your company effectively leverage its employee recognition efforts to support core values?