Defining and Living Your Company Core Values: A Roadmap to Building a Purpose-Driven Culture

Andrew Le
2025-02-24T09:11:12-05:00
Defining and Living Your Company Core Values: A Roadmap to Building a Purpose-Driven Culture
Great Place To Work

Want a company culture people actually care about? It starts with living your core values—not just framing them on the wall. Let’s talk about why relevance, resonance, and leading by example turn good cultures into great ones.

We all have our own personal core values — those unspoken rules that guide how we treat others and tackle problems. Maybe it’s honesty, creativity, or putting family first. These principles shape who we are and how we move through the world.

It’s the same thing for companies. Just as your core values influence how you treat others and approach challenges, a company’s core values serve as its moral compass, guiding everything from strategic decisions to everyday interactions.

Core values are the DNA that shapes how an organization thinks, acts, and grows. When done right, they’re the invisible force behind every decision, from the boardroom to the breakroom.

What are company core values, and why do they matter?

Company core values are fundamental beliefs and guiding principles that shape a company’s culture, decision-making, and behaviors.

These values influence how employees interact with one another, how leaders make decisions, and how the company engages with customers, stakeholders, and the community.

When values are clear, your employees and leaders are able to rally around a shared purpose. And when a company has a shared purpose, it fosters trust, improves retention, and drives long-term success.

Some examples of core values your company could consider are integrity, accountability, belonging, creativity, innovation, and teamwork. But there’s no limit to what can and can’t be a core value — think beyond platitudes and into what really defines your organization.

The benefits of strong core values in the workplace

By defining your company’s core values, you ensure that employee behaviors, leadership decisions, and your overall business strategy are aligned.

Strong core values benefit organizations by:

Creating a strong, consistent culture: Clearly defined values ensure alignment across the organization, fostering a sense of shared purpose.

Attracting and retaining top talent: Employees want to work for companies whose values align with their own.

Building trust and engagement: Employees are more likely to trust leadership and feel engaged when they see company values lived out daily.

Driving better business performance: Great Place To Work? research shows that values-driven companies outperform their competitors in revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and innovation.

Enhancing decision-making and accountability: A well-defined value system helps leaders and employees make ethical and strategic decisions, ensuring consistency in actions.

Empowering autonomy and agility: When core values are clear and resonate, employees feel empowered to make decisions on their own, without needing constant oversight. This agility allows companies to be more responsive and customer-centric.

Take Trek Bicycle, for example. Their core value of “Do the right thing” isn’t just a slogan—it’s a principle that guides every decision. Employees are trusted to make goodwill calls, even if it means a short-term financial cost.

This company core value grows out of Trek’s broader commitment to hospitality and is reinforced daily through company communications and the environment itself—if you visit Trek Headquarters, you’ll see “Do the right thing” printed boldly on the walls. Trek employees know they’re empowered to act in the best interest of customers.

One notable example came from a Trek store in Houston. A technician learned that a customer was repairing a broken-down bike for a neighbor’s son who had recently had his bike stolen.

Recognizing the opportunity to make a real impact, the technician and store manager located a like-new trade-in bike and gifted it to the customer—complete with a new lock to prevent future theft. No one asked for permission; they just did what they felt was right.

These stories aren’t anomalies—they’re part of Trek’s DNA. The company tracks these moments of goodwill through its Net Promoter Score (NPS), analyzing customer feedback for examples of exceptional hospitality. Positive reviews highlighting employees “doing the right thing” are celebrated company-wide, while areas for improvement are used as learning moments.

Trek’s example shows how empowering employees through clear, resonant values doesn’t just improve customer satisfaction—it builds loyalty, trust, and long-term business success.

Steps to define your company’s core values

For core values to really stick, you need to be strategic about defining them. It’s more than just coming up with nice-sounding cliches — your values should speak to what your company and who your employees want to be.

If you’re just starting to define your own organization’s values, take these first steps:

1. Gather employee and leadership input. Conduct listening sessions, employee surveys, or focus groups to understand what employees believe the company stands for. Engage leadership to align on the company’s long-term vision and purpose.

2. Identify key themes and priorities. Analyze feedback and look for common themes that reflect the company’s culture. What behaviors already drive success in the company?

3. Draft and refine goals. Develop a short, memorable list of values (typically three to six) that reflect the company’s mission, purpose, and culture.

4. Ensure they are actionable and specific. You want values that are unique to you, not generic terms.

5. Test and gather feedback. Share the values with employees and stakeholders to refine the language. Make sure language is inclusive and resonates across all levels of the organization.

6. Embed values into company culture. Integrate values into every aspect of your business, including recruitment, hiring, onboarding, leadership training, performance reviews, and recognition programs. Encourage leaders to model and emphasize values whenever possible.

7. Communicate, communicate, communicate! Create ongoing storytelling around core values, whether it’s with employee spotlights, newsletters, or company events.

Get more tips on how to build a great company culture.

Examples of meaningful core values

To see how strong core values can play out in the real world, check out the initiatives of these Certified companies.

Brains

The first step to defining your core values is to get input from those who matter most: the people within the company.

Creative agency Brains did this through a “listening tour” in which leadership directly asked employees questions such as, “What’s something great you want to maintain?” or “What’s the worst thing that could happen with new leadership?”

The answers they received helped them to identify key cultural priorities, such as improving collaboration and transparency. One way Brains responded to this feedback was by introducing a salary guide with defined pay ranges for roles, removing ambiguity around raises and promotions.

Brains also implemented a feedback loop to ensure they were constantly in sync with their values. For example, when employees identified issues like “management has a clear vision” as an area for improvement based on their Trust Index? Survey responses, leadership enacted a three-year plan with transparent progress

updates.

Wegmans

Grocer Wegmans Food Markets has set out five core values:

1. We care about the well-being and success of every person.

2. High standards are a way of life. We pursue excellence in everything we do.

3. We make a difference in every community we serve.

4. We respect and listen to our people.

5. We empower our people to make decisions that improve their work and benefit our customers and our company.

That fifth value is a great example of how Wegmans supports frontline workers. These employees are the immediate face of a company, interacting with customers on a daily basis. But because they’re so focused on the day-to-day, they can often forget about purpose.

By empowering frontline workers to adapt in the moment, Wegmans not only leaves space for better customer service, it reminds the team that they have a shared mission.

American Express

Teamwork is one of those core values that, on the surface, can seem easy to implement — after all, teams work together every day, don’t they?

But true teamwork takes effort. At American Express, the company encourages teams to collaborate and celebrates innovation through events like its two-day “GrowthHack,” in which technology and product teams come together to brainstorm new ideas.

Similarly, other business units at American Express host “Shark Tank”-style pitch competitions, that not only help employees to develop their business acumen but can also identify new projects worth pursuing.

NVIDIA

For IT company NVIDIA, the core value of “One Team” was on display when the company supported the well-being of employees in Russia amid the war with Ukraine.

The company covered the costs for hundreds of employees and their families to leave Russia and relocate to Armenia. And with looming banking restrictions due to international sanctions, the company quickly advanced salaries to its employees located there.

Deloitte

Tax consulting firm Deloitte says its core values are:

1. Lead the way

2. Serve with integrity

3. Take care of each other

4. Foster inclusion

5. Collaborate for measurable impact

Several of these values can be seen in Deloitte’s environment, social, and governance (ESG) efforts. For example, the company serves with integrity by reviewing its global supply chains to minimize its carbon footprint. It fosters inclusion by offering a generous parental leave policy that supports both mothers and fathers.

Trek Bicycle

Trek Bicycle is a prime example of a company that successfully implemented core values to enhance its workplace culture.

With a dispersed global workforce of approximately 6,500 employees in 27 countries, Trek needed a way to measure employee satisfaction. Using the Trust Index survey feedback from Great Place To Work, Trek identified areas for improvement and took steps to foster a more inclusive and engaging work environment.

One of those areas for improvement was transparency. By breaking down employee survey data, Trek fostered a sense of ownership among its leaders and encouraged managers to take accountability for their teams’ satisfaction and performance.

The result? Trek saw a 24% increase in positive responses to the statement, “My manager keeps me informed about important issues and changes.”

Living your core values

It’s not enough to just name your core values — for them to become truly ingrained in the business, you need to embed them into your daily operations. Your values should be visible in everything from your job postings to how managers lead meetings.

Here are some concrete ways you can incorporate your core values into your company’s everyday operations:

Hiring: Integrate your core values into the full recruitment process, including job descriptions, interview questions, and onboarding.

Recognition: Recognize employees for ways in which they demonstrate your values. Tie performance review conversations with values.

Leadership and management practices: Train managers to model and reinforce core values in their communication. Ensure executives consistently demonstrate values through actions, not just words.

Decision-making: Use core values as a guiding framework for business decisions and ethical dilemmas. Even behind closed doors, this will help executives communicate how a particular decision was made.

Training and development: Integrate values into ongoing training programs, leadership development, and mentoring or coaching.

Community contributions: Encourage employees to participate in community service or initiatives that are aligned with company values. For example, Deloitte has a core value of “Making an Impact that Matters” and hosts initiatives like Deloitte Impact Day, when employees dedicate a full day to community service.

Regularly assess and evolve: Conduct surveys and focus groups to measure how well values are being lived. If values are no longer resonant, consider making changes. You can use tools like Great Place To Work’s employee engagement survey tool to measure how well your company is aligned with its core values.

Challenges in living core values and how to overcome them

Sometimes, a company may struggle to maintain its core values, especially if there hasn’t been sufficient buy-in from leadership. And when how a company’s words don’t match its actions, you risk alienating your employees.

For example, let’s say your company has decided on integrity and prioritizing ethics over personal gain as one of your core values. But one of your sales teams consistently overpromises to close deals with clients. Despite employee complaints, management turns a blind eye because the team brings in significant revenue — eroding employees’ trust in leadership.

The impact of this kind of disconnect is more than just poor morale. Great Place To Work research shows that when employees trust their leaders and find meaning in their work, the business sees higher employee retention and even better stock market performance.

If your workplace seems to be saying one thing but doing another, it’s time to step back and find the why.

Is it that the values you identified don’t feel relevant to employees’ daily work or the company mission?

Do your values resonate emotionally with employees, leaders, and customers?

Have your values been communicated clearly and regularly throughout the entire organization?

Are you reminding leadership of their role modeling these values and fostering a culture of transparency and accountability?

Once you identify where the breakdown in values is originating, you can work on righting the course.

Leadership’s role in exemplifying core values

As mentioned, no matter how strongly you define your core values, if your leadership isn’t living them, those values might as well have been written in invisible ink.

Great leaders help employees by putting transparency and accountability at the heart of the workplace. To truly embody your company’s core values, leaders should:

Make values part of the conversation. Don’t just mention values during onboarding or annual meetings. Reference them in decision-making discussions, highlight them in team successes, and acknowledge when tough choices were made to uphold them. For instance, praise a manager who pushed back on an unrealistic deadline to maintain quality standards.

Own your mistakes publicly. When leaders miss the mark on company values, they should acknowledge it openly. If you’ve fallen short of your “respect for all” value by interrupting junior team members in meetings, address it directly: “I realize I haven’t been living up to our value of respect, and here’s how I’m working to improve.”

Create systems that reinforce values. If innovation is a core value, set aside dedicated time for experimentation and ensure performance reviews reward creative thinking — not just quick wins. If work-life balance is crucial, implement clear boundaries around after-hours communications.

Consider values in promotion decisions. If collaboration is a core value, don’t promote the brilliant but difficult manager who creates silos. Make it clear that living the values is just as important as hitting performance targets.

Measuring the impact of core values

Whether employees feel a sense of purpose at work is one of the strongest predictors of whether they’ll stay — or walk out the door.

To get data-driven insights on whether your employees connect with your core values, conduct regular employee experience surveys.

The key is to track these metrics over time and across different teams. Look for patterns: Are certain departments consistently scoring lower on values-related questions? Are there specific values that employees feel are more aspirational than real?

This granular data helps you identify where your values are taking root and where they need more nurturing. Most importantly, share these results transparently with your team and outline specific actions you’ll take to address any gaps — remember, measuring without acting is just as damaging as not measuring at all.

Inspiring a purpose-driven workplace culture

Well-defined core values can transform workplace culture, making it more purpose-driven and aligned with the company’s mission.

If your organization is struggling to define its core values or wants to measure the impact of those values, Great Place To Work offers employee survey software that can help you assess employee engagement and create a more positive workplace culture.