Keeping Your Brand’s Core Values Alive
In today’s competitive business landscape, establishing and maintaining strong core values is crucial for building a brand that resonates with your audience and fosters long-term success. Here are practical strategies for creating and keeping your core values alive in your workplace, ensuring they remain a vital part of your company’s culture and operations.
1. Define Your Core Values Clearly
The foundation of maintaining core values lies in defining them clearly from the outset. Core values should reflect what your company stands for and help guide decisions and actions. Let’s take a look at Vibrant Brand’s core values as an example.
- Learn & Grow: Continuously improve ourselves, our processes, and the quality of our final products and services. Adapt and embrace the changes in our industry to consistently better our outcomes.
- Kindness & Comfort: Create a comfortable environment for everyone through kindness and inclusion. Treat others as we wish to be treated and respect differences.
- Keep Promises: Deliver on our word. Keep clients informed and update them as necessary.
- Get Stuff Done: Our work has a real impact on our clients and our company. Seek to complete tasks, move projects along, and meet deadlines and expectations. Work through and around problems.
- Flexible Lifestyle: Provide the ability to work anywhere, creating harmony between work and other aspects of our lives, leading to a happier and more productive work environment.
These values shape our culture and drive our commitment to excellence. They are clearly stated on our website and discussed with employees and prospective hires.
2. Include Your Team in the Discussion
Core values are meaningless if they don’t resonate with your team, who are the “core” of your organization. At Vibrant Brands, we included every team member in the discussion. Each employee was asked to express values that resonate with them and that they would want to see implemented in our work culture. From these discussions and submissions came our current five core values, encompassing thoughts from each team member. We also plan to revisit the core values periodically, allowing team members to voice new and evolving thoughts.
3. Communicate Values Effectively
Effective communication of your core values is essential. Ensure all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and investors understand and embrace these values. Transparency and consistency in communication help build trust and loyalty.
4. Integrate Values into Your Company Culture
To keep your core values alive, embed them into your company culture. Live by these values daily and ensure they influence every aspect of your operations. Encourage leaders to exemplify these values and create an environment where employees feel inspired to follow suit. If ‘Flexible Lifestyle‘ only applies to leadership positions while other employees are not given the same flexibility, then your organization cannot claim it as a core value. Similarly, if some team members consistently ignore deadlines without repercussions, while others pick up the slack, the ‘Keep Promises‘ and ‘Get Stuff Done‘ values essentially become meaningless. All team members, especially those in leadership roles, must ensure the core values apply to everyone and all work practices to maintain their significance.
5. Incorporate Values Into Hiring and Onboarding
Your hiring and onboarding processes should reflect your core values. Look for candidates who align with your values and integrate these principles into their roles. During onboarding, educate new hires about your company’s mission, vision, and core values and ask for their thoughts. At Vibrant Brands, we emphasize “Learn & Grow” by encouraging continuous improvement and adaptation to new tools and methods, ensuring our team is always evolving.
6. Promote Values Through Awareness Campaigns
Generating awareness about your brand’s core values helps reinforce their importance and keep them top of mind. Leverage social media and other communication channels to share stories and examples highlighting the core values in action. This not only strengthens your brand identity but also fosters accountability. For instance, Vibrant Brands’ case studies are great examples of our “Keep Promises” and “Get Stuff Done” values. Employment campaigns are another opportunity for the promotion of core values. By incorporating your core values into recruitment messaging you can ensure the organization attracts like-minded individuals who will help lead your company to success.
7. Consistency is Key
Consistency in upholding your core values is vital for building a strong brand reputation. Ensure that every action and decision reflects your values. Any deviation can undermine your brand’s integrity and credibility. Avoid compromising your values for short-term gains, as this can erode trust and damage your brand’s reputation. Choose core values you know the company can consistently uphold.
By defining, integrating, and consistently upholding your core values, you can create a strong, authentic brand that resonates with your audience and stands the test of time. At Vibrant Brands, we are committed to helping businesses like yours develop and maintain core values that embody your brand and drive success.
Contact us today to learn more about our tailored solutions. Let’s work together to keep your brand’s core values alive and thriving.