Have you ever walked into a business, a store, an office or even a car dealership where you got an instant “bad vibe”? Staff might have been cold, distant, disinterested or even ambivalent.
This feeling you got was most likely a symptom of one of two things.
Suspect #1:
Generally a poor company culture
Or
Suspect #2:
They used to have a good company culture but forgot to put values alignment at the centre of their recruitment strategy.
Don’t be suspect #2!
Hiring based on values and sitting at the heart of your decision making will not only let you and your team have better work experiences with each other, your culture will have a much better chance to thrive as well.
Some of the key benefits of hiring based on values for your consideration:
✨ Sharing similar values = better alignment to company culture. What this means for example is let’s say you run a small organisation that makes “widgets” which are useful and valuable, and a portion of your profits goes to feeding those in need. For you, the value of care for others may be high on your list. If you hire someone who also genuinely cares about looking out for the underserved populations, they will align so much better to what you want to achieve.
✨ Employee to be more engaged in their work. Take that same person you hired who shares your values, it flows on that because they care about the work you do, they will be more engaged and invested in their work too, and if their job helped with creating better widgets or selling more widgets, they are more likely to care about the outcome.
✨ Sense of belonging. When you and your team are invested and engaged, it creates a natural shared purpose and a sense of belonging to that purpose and to each other. You might set targets and everyone feels that working towards those targets brings you all together more cohesively. This leads on to better team collaboration too, bonus!
✨ Conflict managed in a more productive way - the reality is sometimes you’ll not agree on the best way to make or promote a widget and there will be conflict. If you are aligned to the value of respect, for example, then you’re more likely to discuss the issue in a constructive way where people are heard and ideas are safe to share.
✨ Keep your employees longer. And isn’t the point of hiring to find good people and then to keep them? I mean, who wants to keep hiring the same roles over and over again because they didn’t get the values alignment right?
Story Time!
We’re going to go to the dark side for just a moment. Funny story (or not) a friend of mine told me about an interview she went on many years ago. The hiring manager really wanted to employ her, not so much because of who she was as a person but more so for her years of experience and the need to just get someone into the seat. For her, she was looking for a cultural and values fit. It would be her first job after having a child and it was important to her she got that right.
Because the hiring manager was desperate, they told her everything she was hoping to hear from a new employer. She missed the signs that something was off, even though her gut told her the offer was too good to be true. So she accepted the offer.
On her first day, she got to look behind the curtain and found an organisation filled with what seemed like office zombies. 😲 There was literally no energy in the room, it was dark and physically cold. Even when she got up to get a drink of water, everyone would look up and stare. She immediately knew she made a mistake…and a few days later when she resigned they knew their mistake too.
By not being authentic, explaining where their culture was at and what they planned to do to improve it they missed out an opportunity to start fixing something clearly broken. They also hid the fact that their culture was all about “all work and no play”. She still wouldn’t have been the right fit, but other people like to come to work and just dig in and there’s nothing wrong with that.
So what’s the moral of this story? Maybe you’ve been overworked, you might feel a bit burnt out by being understaffed, or maybe you know your culture or work environment has areas to improve. This is your reminder of how critical it is to be authentic and align your genuine values with your hiring. So if your culture is great, you can share that with passion. And if right now it’s not so great, you can work towards improvement by hiring for the right values from here on out!
So when you’re thinking about preparing to interview for a candidate, think about some of the following things and make sure you don’t miss out on the key ones that are right for you.
Elements to team culture that should be considered when hiring:
✨ How does your team communicate - hire someone who can work with the way you like to communicate as individuals and as a team.
✨ What is important to your business - hire someone who cares about what your business does. I like to ask something along the line of what was it about your company or the role that interested them to apply, to see if those interests align, and that usually weeds out those who didn’t take the time to care.
✨ It sets how the team works together - more than communication, how does your culture affect people working productively together in a team?
✨ It outlines mechanisms for feedback - your culture creates a safe (or unsafe) space for employees and employers to give and receive feedback, this is important for your business to continue to grow through the diversity of ideas.
✨ It outlines acceptable leadership behaviours - just as much as it outlines acceptable employee behaviour, it also tells the candidate who you will be as a leader. Values of inclusivity or flexibility tells people what to expect.
✨ It builds trust and accountability - this is only true if your values and culture align. If you have values on a page and yet your business works in an entirely different fashion you’ll lose that trust. But if you mean what you say and you do what you say, that will build the trust and accountability that’s critical for keeping your staff long term and keeping them happy.
If I leave you with any final thoughts today, it’s to figure out where your business culture is currently at, maybe take a temperature check within the team. Then consider what your business values are, as well as your own personal values as a leader are. Use that insight to outline a few key values that will most benefit you if you were to hire someone who held them.
After you’ve done that (or even before, I would love to work through this with you) reach out, and we’ll draft an interview guide that hits all your key values as well as the skills you need!
Ash ✨