Corporate values are critical in creating a positive work culture and ensuring long-term organizational success. One effective way of achieving this is to align the employee recognition system with the organization’s core values. Combining the two can prove highly beneficial for the organization.
An organization’s core values are the guiding principles for attaining its mission and vision.
Hence, they help employees navigate their work environment and achieve their goals. It is essentially the means to the end.
Core values help in setting the standards about various aspects of an organization including its brand, the type of talent it intends to attract and the rules of employee engagement in the workplace.
For most employees, corporate values also serve as a reference point for behaviors that can help them ensure their professional success in the organization.
This is precisely why it becomes essential for organizations to clearly define and articulate them properly.
Lack of awareness of corporate values, improper understanding, or miscommunication can lead to workplace dysfunction.
Hence, without a proper definition of core values, it might be difficult to set boundaries for acceptable behaviors.
This makes it difficult for employees to avoid acting in ways that may harm the organization.
Also, employees find it difficult to find meaning in their jobs, which in turn affects their level of satisfaction, engagement, and happiness.
Disambiguated core values often make the employees feel disappointed and demotivated, significantly losing productivity and efficiency.
Corporate values can help orient the employees towards the mission and vision of the organization and help them understand the best ways to fulfill the same.
Organizations need to realize that their employee recognition practices go a long way in communicating and reinforcing their core values to members of their workforce.
Hence, they should take steps to integrate their core values with their employee reward and recognition systems.
Here are a few ways in which the recognition program can help in driving corporate values:
1. Sends out Clear Message about Expected Behaviors
2. Creates Clear Definition of Core Values
3. Helps Drive Individual Performance
Recognition sends a clear message to the employees about what behavior the organization expects of them.
When employees receive appreciation for their accomplishments, their co-workers get to understand which values that are noteworthy and preferred by the organization.
This motivates them to imbibe these values and align their actions and behaviors.
Employee recognition can prove effective in clearly defining the core values of an organization for the employees.
Hence, employees can see the qualities and behaviors that align with the core values.
Hence, employees tend to repeat and emulate these values as the organization appreciates and recognizes them for demonstrating them.
So, it makes the HR and leadership’s work of communicating corporate values to employees much more straightforward.
Also, employee recognition acts as a means of providing personalized acknowledgment to the recipients.
At the same time, it helps them to understand how the core values are integral to their roles and responsibilities.
Hence, it motivates them to perform their roles with more significant commitment, integrity, and efficiency.
This helps in driving individual performance while generating greater awareness about corporate values.
Even though the concepts of corporate values and employee recognition have co-existed for a long time, it is only recently that organizations have realized their strong linkage. Hence, organizations need to redefine their employee recognition strategies to include their core values to derive maximum benefits.
Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of corporate and entrepreneurship experience. In the past, Sagar has worked in leadership roles with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn
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