Core Values

A recent Gallup poll found that only 27% of employees strongly believe in their company's core values. While this is a workplace statistic, the topic has been at the top of my mind recently, primarily because of my work at home with Carolyn.

As our household has grown from just the two of us to now including three small kids, the desire to be on the same page has never felt more necessary. Frustratingly, we’ve had a family mission statement and core values drafted for the better part of 6 months, but we’ve failed to finalize them.

Like all of you, Carolyn and I have plenty of hard things to tackle each week, so why make things harder by not cementing beliefs that have the potential to ground all of our important decisions?

The best businesses generally fall into the 27% that do have core values. They make decisions faster, they create more consistent experiences for their customers, and they usually benefit from more fulfillment in their work.

With that, I have two questions for us today:

1. Why do so few employees connect to their company’s core values?

2. Why don’t we see more families create formal core values at home?

Doing what is good for the business

Companies create these statements because it is important to know what you stand for and how you expect your employees to represent the company.

Even though this seems pretty common sense and admirable, most companies struggle with it. I believe a significant factor is our culture’s commitment to putting up a wall between work and life, and how this has led to an undertone of distrust between people and business.

That is why we all too commonly hear comments like these:

• "At the end of the day, it's just business."

• "HR works for the company, not for you."

• "Mission statements are just marketing."

• "They'll do what's best for the bottom line, not for you."

These types of comments are indicative of why so few people fully commit to the organizations they are a part of. Companies are fighting an uphill battle because of how hard culture is working against them.

The crazy thing is, if we think commitment to core values is low in the workplace, I couldn’t even find a statistic for how many families have clear core values at home.

Family core values and why few have them

We all know the one family that seems to do everything we wish we had the discipline and commitment to do. That family you are thinking about probably has published core values.

While businesses may be getting low commitment to their values, it is pretty rare to find a business that doesn’t at least have a set of them. So why isn’t the same true at home?

🌟 I believe we fail to implement core values at home because it feels too much like something we’d do at work 🌟 

Remember, culture tells us that deep down, businesses are not “for us”. So why would we take a best business practice and apply it in our homes? Easy, we wouldn’t! And because of that, we miss out on an opportunity to channel professional growth into personal flourishing.

A challenge for the week

If more families had written down core values, I would bet anything that there would be fewer financial issues, relationships would be stronger, and families would experience more thriving vs surviving.

So here is my challenge to you this week.

1. Think about some of the best practices you’ve learned through your work in the last year. Maybe it’s core values, maybe it’s something different.

2. Ask yourself, what would it look like to implement that at home?

3. Try it out!

Not everything in the workplace is going to translate, but honestly, I hope that more does as we open our minds up to mixing our home and work worlds more proactively.

Here is potentially the coolest part about this. If we start looking for ways to bring the best parts of our work into our home, I believe it will only elevate the quality of our practices in the workplace.

👉️ When you consider how something will translate back into your home, there is a level of accountability that will naturally raise the bar for the integrity of our business practices 👈️ 

Whether you write down some family core values or something else, I’d love to hear about the kinds of business best practices that you decide to try out at home! As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to talk and discuss anything from this or prior posts! And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from this, I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Hope and Gratitude,

Alex