Why Team Values Matter to Your Business Goals

We often think about team values on a macro level, such as how they influence those big decisions. But team values are also incredibly important on a micro level. The values you hold as an organisation drive the decisions you make each day – and the same is true for every member of your team.

Team values are important to us here at Mo. We work to define and celebrate our values at every level by building a recognition-rich culture. That means taking the time to understand and strengthen our team values as well as our individual and core company values.

Why are we keen to invest so much effort into this?

Strong Values Improve Business Metrics

Teams with strong values and good ethics can drive your business towards success by creating a firm foundation with minimal conflict and a mutually beneficial atmosphere.

A recent LinkedIn survey found that a whopping 87% of Gen Z professionals would be prepared to quit their jobs for one that aligned more closely with their values.

Companies that can uphold and successfully communicate their values are not only more attractive to customers, who want to feel good about their choices, but they are more attractive to employees too, especially with Gen Z new starts.

So, What are Team Values?

Team values are a shared understanding of how each member will work together and how they will treat each other while doing it. A set of values can guide every communication, creating a strong backbone for facing all kinds of challenges or projects.

Your team values may differ slightly from your organisation’s values as a whole. This isn’t a problem as long as you are on the same path.

The reason for the divergence is the fact that while values can be instilled, they should also be organic and people-led. Your team values should accurately reflect the individual members who make up your team.

Why Are Team Values Important?

The power of team values is in their ability to become a true framework for your employees. While your business’s values are also important, they can feel abstract or ‘big picture’. Team values, on the other hand, are present in every interaction. They can be instrumental in creating a healthy working environment and promoting psychological safety among employees.

According to research, 37% of employees say working with a great team is their primary reason for staying in their role.

Strong team values can also help you avoid conflict and encourage a positive atmosphere that can lay the foundations for high-performing teams.

A Positive Culture is Key to Modern Working

Celebrate and uplift the individuals who demonstrate their commitment to upholding team values and you’ll be building a culture of success and mutual support.

A strong set of team values can also help your company maintain its core ethos, even during periods of change. Forbes reports that periods of growth can cause businesses to lose sight of their values, leading to serious issues such as a lack of direction or employee disengagement.

And seeing as Harvard Business School asserts that core values are vital for strategy execution, as they shape both company and individual behaviour, this is something you want to avoid.

By encouraging robust team values, you create a framework to support your employees, which in turn makes it possible to maintain your core company values throughout.

Build a Positive Company Culture: Step-by-step

Your team’s values are a series of beliefs they hold about themselves, your business and each other, and when those beliefs are translated into action, they become behaviours.

To understand the values your team already has and the ones you’d like to grow in the future, keep an eye out for the following indicators.

1. Care and Kindness

Teams that are kind and care about how everyone is doing help create a working environment that encourages growth. People should always come first.

Achieving goals and hitting work deadlines is important, but keeping teams happy and healthy will yield greater results overall. Every organisation will face many challenges on its road to success. Teams who can accept and engage with problems that arise are in a great position to overcome them and feel motivated to find solutions.

2. Respectful Collaborations

The way we talk to each other has a huge impact on our confidence and well-being. Not everyone has to agree all the time, but our teams know how to communicate differences effectively and with respect.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report in 2022, 95% of people who are thriving at work report being treated with respect all day.

3. Drive for Growth and Innovation

When teams have a desire for growth as a core value, they will be actively looking out for ways to improve everything from day-to-day processes to large-scale business operations.

There are few better motivators than a genuine passion for the work you’re doing. When your team values align with your company’s goals, passion can take a driving seat and help individuals feel energised and enthused about their daily tasks.

4. A Balanced Approach

Maintaining a good work-life balance is key, especially in our ultra-connected world. When teams understand how important it is to rest, replenish and enjoy their time outside of working hours, they’re more likely to be able to perform well during them.

5. Open and Honest Conversation

Trust is essential when it comes to building solid teams. From leadership you can trust to colleagues who put honesty above all else, there is nothing like knowing you can rely on the rest of your team to tell you the truth about what’s working and what isn’t.

6. Creative and Curious

A team that puts stock into creativity and curiosity is in a great position to solve problems and meet challenges head-on. High-performing teams are willing to push boundaries and consider new possibilities – but those things are hard to do without the freedom to be and feel creative.

How to Strengthen Your Team Values

1. Create a cross-functional team

Pull together a group of people from different departments and seniority levels for a 1-2 hour brainstorming session. Ask them to bring their thoughts to the session on what values they feel really represent the company and the people they work with.

What do they value in others and want to emulate? Is there an element of healthy challenge involved where people feel a sense of psychological safety in disagreeing with one another?

Be sure to record the session to look back on, and use a real or virtual whiteboard to record the suggestions. You may then want to group them into themes and ask your participants to vote on a short list of potential values.

2. Use your shortlist to create an employee survey

You may want to involve everyone else in the company at this stage, so everyone feels bought into your new values. From the shortlist you created in your initial brainstorming session, pull together a survey to ask people to vote on the values that they feel most represent their work and how they want to behave. Ask for feedback on the shortlist, and find out if anyone feels that certain themes are missing.

After you have the results, you must take action to continuously improve your company culture.

3. Present and codify your final values

Create a short slideshow to share at your next company or team all-hands meeting to talk everyone through the new values, and crucially, how you expect people’s interactions to change as a result (if that is the case). If it’s simply formalising the way people already behave, be sure to communicate that. You may be wondering how to build your values into the day-to-day.

The key is to not make them too long-winded – you only want 4-5 values so that they’re easy to remember. The second important step is to build them into your work. Using an employee experience tool like Mo, you can ask employees to tag the values that they think their colleagues have displayed within employee recognition shoutouts.

How Mo Can Help Your Team Values

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that turns your team insights into meaningful action. What do we mean by action? Let’s say your company aims to improve feelings of belonging and connection across hybrid and remote teams but struggles to integrate those values across your whole organisation. There’s no consistency from management. Some teams receive plenty of recognition whereas others get nothing at all. Employees complain that they don’t feel valued by their department and suffer from a lack of engagement from their line manager.

A lack of team values has several obvious outcomes: productivity plummets, employees leave, and hiring costs rocket. If this sounds familiar, we can turn it around within six months. Mo’s platform integrates them into your company culture through our unique strategies.

If you’d like to talk to one of our experts about improving team values in your organisation, book a demo with someone today.

Transform your culture with Mo

Book a free demo to learn how Mo can help you:

• 🤝 Improve employee engagement scores
• 🚀 Reduce employee churn
• 😍 Build a collaborative culture

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Mo Helps Embed Team Values Through Action

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

If you’re looking for ways to take action on measuring employee engagement, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.