The truth about work values

Modern organisations today try to stand out against competition by being more “Green” and “Ethical” in every aspect. Leaders today speak about the importance of employees (rather than products) and responsibility towards the environment (rather than business), and this took a bigger attention after the wheel of innovation slowed down where most of the consumer products today are similar and are in the same price range, so how do employers differentiate themselves?

Being “Green” is a fashion that even tobacco companies promote! And being a “Values-Based” organisation has also been a focus for organisations over the past 10 years, and is gaining further attention. It was important to me as well as several leaders in different areas of the business to discover if companies are really “Values-Based” or is it another myth of “Tobacco-Green companies”!

Over 6 months, I carried out a 1 minute research and managed to collect 858 responses from employees representing organisations operating in 10 different industries in the Middle East. The Majority of responses were from healthcare (33.3%), Education (18.4%), Financial services (13.2%), Business Support and Automotive organisations (10% each). I wanted to discover if the organisationally-advertised work values are truly followed at work and if they mean something to employees. The results were surprising!

63% of the respondents agreed that leaders in their organisations were not role models of the values. They further agreed that leaders will not take actions if the values are breached (especially if the breacher was a good contact of the leader!)

The surprising figure here was the significant agreement that organisations would compromise values for business results and the respondents’ comments gave an alarming insight that whistle-blowing is going to cost organisations a lot if they do not re-evaluate their work equation.. Here are some interesting insights about some of the advertised key values and the comments of some employees:

Respect

One of the most frequently reported breached value. Stories of discrimination at the work place based on gender (perceived weaker females), age (perceived “young and doesn’t have enough knowledge”) and race (perceived lower grade brains) were reported by the respondents. Some employees mentioned that they have formally reported those incidents to higher levels of leadership and submitted formal grievance / compliance applications, but since the offender was a senior leader, they were asked to “forgive and forget”, as the leader “didn’t mean it”!

Team work

There was a consensus that team work was one of the values that were encouraged “verbally” by organisations but never measured or rewarded. In fact, most of the rewards were “individually” assessed and cross-departmental work was not evaluated properly. There was a feeling of “Me”, “My department” then “My organisation”, and this should be the other way around if organisations want employees to be engaged with the organisational mission.

Growth and development

Employees reported that assessments were not fairly conducted, and in many cases, assessment centres were made to justify decisions that have already been made. Some employees reported that several positions in their organisations were created specifically around certain employees and were never advertised! (Despite that the organisational leaders clearly mentioned that all leadership positions will be advertised internally for all internal employees to compete upon). How do organisations select the “Best” employee if they do not properly assess? Does a senior leader’s recommendation do well enough? So where does the “Team” word hide?

The survey facts drove a clear interest to investigate this further and I am working now with fellow researchers on analysing this conflict zone; however, the clear shocking fact to me was that there is one clearly breached value that is considered a “Permission-To-Play” in the world of business .. and that is ..

How do organisations manage without this? If organisations advertise “Work Values” and then they do not reward or penalise performance based on this, then why do they advertise the same?

Would you do business with an organisation that has no integrity? Most probably not! Then what is the reason behind organisations taking it easy on values while not allowing business results to be compromised?

Where did “Hire for Values and develop skills” statement go? How do we believe organisations who claim that they care about the environment if they do not care about their own people?!

The Verdict

Most of the organisations I have researched lacked “Values-Based” recruitment, and focused more on skills or competency-based recruitment, while leaders still insisted that they hire for values.

The story starts from the very beginning .. from the recruitment phase, until organisations focus on values-based recruitment, they should not expect that the values they promote will be visible at the workplace.. It’s a moment of truth and decision making .. Do you really care about work values?

Values will guide the way you do business, so if organisations are serious about the “Way” they do business, then they are expected to Hire and Fire for Values!