Company values are the small number of behaviours an organisation commits to rewarding, including when it is expensive. That is the whole definition, and the word doing the work is rewarding. A value nobody was ever promoted for, and nobody was ever corrected over, is a decoration.
The measurable state of this is bleak. Gallup finds that only 27 % of employees strongly agree they believe in their organisation's values, and only 41 % strongly agree they know what their company stands for (Gallup on company values). Not because the values were badly written. Because writing them was treated as the project.
If you want the conceptual groundwork first, what values are, why they matter and how companies like Patagonia and Toyota use theirs, our colleagues covered that in was sind Unternehmenswerte. This article starts where that one ends: the four types of value, a workshop format that produces three rather than ten, what to do when two values collide, and how to tell whether yours are lived or laminated.
Four types of value, and only one of them is yours
Patrick Lencioni made this distinction in Make Your Values Mean Something, and it is still the fastest way to cut a list of ten down to three. Most value lists fail because all four types are mixed into one bullet list, which makes every item look equally important and therefore equally ignorable.
| Type | What it is | Test | Belongs on the wall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | Already true, and you would keep it even if it cost you a customer | Name the last time it cost you money | Yes |
| Aspirational | Not true yet, needed for where you are going | Is someone accountable for closing the gap? | Yes, labelled as aspirational |
| Permission to play | Honesty, respect, integrity. The minimum for employment | Would any competitor disagree? | No |
| Accidental | Grown from who you hired, often unnoticed and sometimes exclusionary | Does it describe your team or your customers? | No, but name it out loud |
If you cannot name a decision a value has cost you, it is not a core value yet. It might be aspirational, which is fine and honest, or permission to play, which belongs in the employment contract rather than on the wall.
The values workshop: six steps to three values
Start from behaviour, not from adjectives
Everyone writes down three moments in the last year when they were proud of how the company acted, and one when they were not. Adjectives come later, from the stories.
Sort every candidate into the four types
Use the table above. Permission-to-play values get removed here, and that usually takes a ten-item list down to five.
Apply the cost test to each survivor
For every candidate, name one real decision in the last two years where this value would have changed the outcome. No example, no value.
Write the anti-value for each one
A value with no plausible opposite is empty. Speed
is a value because thoroughness
is a defensible alternative someone could reasonably choose.
Cut to three
Three is what people recall under pressure, and recall under pressure is the only situation in which a value does any work at all.
Attach each value to one existing process
Hiring, promotion or the budget round. A value that changes no process is a poster. This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is why the workshop repeats in three years.
When two values collide
Value conflicts are not a flaw in the list, they are the point of having one. A list that never conflicts is a list that never decides anything. What matters is that the order is known before the conflict arrives, because in the moment the loudest person decides instead.
Does the culture you have carry the strategy you announced?
The Culture-Strategy Fit Check makes the gap between the two visible in five minutes, with an instant AI first analysis. Free, by CultureLoop.
Measuring whether they are lived or laminated
There are three signals, and none of them requires a consulting project.
The first is recall. Ask ten people across three levels to name the values without looking. If the answers do not converge, the list is too long or too abstract, and no amount of communication will fix a list of ten.
The second is the gap between stated and lived. Ask the same group to rate, separately, how important each value is said to be and how important it actually is in daily decisions. The distance between the two numbers is the only value metric that predicts anything, and it is what a culture assessment survey is built to produce.
The third is process evidence. Open the last five promotions and the last three supplier decisions and ask which value shows up in the reasoning. If none does, the values are not in the machine yet, whatever the intranet says. Where the suspicion is that the culture and the strategy have drifted apart rather than the values being wrong, the Culture-Strategy Fit Check is the shorter route, and the company vision guide covers the direction half of the same question.
Measure the gap between stated and lived
The culture assessment survey asks your team how important each value is said to be and how important it actually is. The distance between the two is the number worth watching. Free, with AI analysis.
Values are working when
Someone can name a customer you turned down because of one
They appear in promotion reasoning without being quoted
New hires can name them after four weeks
The order between two of them is known in advance
Values are decoration when
Every competitor could adopt the list unchanged
There are more than five of them
Honesty, respect or integrity are on the list
The last discussion about them was the workshop that produced them
What happens after the poster
Values live in the processes that reward behaviour, which means the follow-through is mostly HR work rather than communication work: the hiring scorecard, the promotion criteria, the feedback conversation. Nothing in that list is glamorous, and all of it is what separates a company whose values are quoted back by employees from one whose values are quoted back by its own website.
The adjacent instruments help where the values touch behaviour directly. Psychological safety is the precondition for anyone telling you the values are not being lived; a pulse survey catches the drift between two annual checks; and if engagement is the symptom, the employee engagement guide covers what sits underneath it.
The short version
• A value is a behaviour you commit to rewarding when it is expensive. If it never cost anything, it is not one yet.
• Sort candidates into core, aspirational, permission to play and accidental. Only the first two belong on the wall.
• Honesty, respect and integrity are permission to play. No competitor disagrees, so they differentiate nothing.
• Three values, not ten. Three is what people recall under pressure, and pressure is when values matter.
• Write the anti-value. A value with no defensible opposite is empty.
• Attach each one to hiring, promotion or the budget round, or the workshop repeats in three years.
• Measure the gap between stated and lived importance. That distance is the only value metric that predicts anything.
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