At some point in your career, you’ve probably worked at a place that really struggled to maintain its corporate culture. It may have felt that with each new hire, the company’s culture drifted farther from what it had once been until it was almost unrecognizable.
If you now own your own company, you’re probably keenly interested in making sure that doesn’t happen. In an ideal world, every new employee you bring into the fold would be a kindred spirit who would embrace and embody your company’s core values in real, tangible ways.
You can maximize the chances of doing that by changing your onboarding process such that your company’s core values—those things that define your organizational culture, are at the forefront and an integral part of the onboarding process. Here are some tips you can put in practice, beginning with your very next hire to do exactly that:
Sticky Values
The first and simplest way to make your company’s core values sticky is acrosticism and alliteration. So for instance: Cunning, Careful, Conscientious (all C’s – alliteration), makes your core values easy to remember.
If you can’t do that, you can go the acrostic route, and make the first letter of each core value spell out a word (ACE – Accuracy, Creativity, and Excellence).
It’s not always an easy thing to do, depending on your particular values, but it is a relatively simple and straightforward way of making sure your defining values are easy to remember and always at tip of mind.
Tell Your Story (And the Story of Your Company)
If you own the company then the values of your firm no doubt came, in large part (or maybe even wholly) from you. There’s a story in that. There are almost certainly specific reasons why you chose the values that you did to define your company, and thus, your culture.
Begin by telling a new hire the story (legend) of your company, then set the stage to make them an integral part of the continuation of that story.
Lean On The Buddy System
There’s probably someone at your company who really stands out in your mind as really embodying your company’s values, and hopefully, many more than just one. These people are essentially Values Ambassadors and can be used as such. These are the people you want to pair your new hires with for the first few weeks, having them show the newbies the ropes, while simultaneously helping to really instill your core values into them, right from the start.
Along the way, your Values Ambassadors can also tell stories of instances where specific employees used your company’s core values to solve problems for the business, or help take the company to a new level.
This is a powerful one-two punch that can help ensure that your new hires are steeped in the values you want to find a permanent place in your company. As a last step, as the “shadowing” period draws to an end, give the employee a gift that will serve as a tangible reminder of one or more of your core values. Here are some great gift ideas to help get you started.
There’s certainly no shortage of things you can do to help ensure that new hires help to maintain the kind of corporate culture you want, but these three represent a solid foundation that can be built upon later.