Company Values Document Template

Before anyone drafts a word, collect stories of what people actually did. Louis Efron, a principal at Gallup, suggests a quick check on existing values: ask a random employee for a story that supports them¹. Blank stares, silence or a long "hmm" mean the values aren't being lived.

The most useful records are specific and already written down: peer kudos, comments from your last engagement survey and exit interview notes. Take a full year of them, so one busy month doesn't skew the count.

1. 1

   Tag each record once

   Match it to the one draft value it shows most clearly. If none fits, leave it untagged.

2. 2

   Count each value's share

   A value behind a handful of records out of hundreds is thin, however good its wording sounds.

3. 3

   Keep the best stories

   Save one or two per value that name an action and an outcome, not just "thanks for being great."

4. 4

   Read the untagged pile

   Records that fit no draft value can point to a value you live but haven't named yet.

Treat the records as evidence, not a vote. The consultant Patrick Lencioni calls surveying all employees about which values to adopt² a bad idea, partly because it gives the false impression that all input is equally valuable. In his experience, the best values efforts are driven by a small team: the CEO, any founders still there and a handful of key employees.

Keep the list short. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras found that none of the visionary companies they studied had more than five core values³, and most had three or four. Their test for each candidate: if circumstances changed and penalized you for holding it, would you still keep it? If you can't honestly say yes, drop it.

One technology company they describe asked this of quality, said no, and kept quality in its strategy instead of its values. Leading-edge innovation passed the same test.

Lencioni sorts values into four types, and only core values belong on the main list.

Integrity is the classic mix-up. A 2020 MIT Sloan Management Review study of large, mainly US companies found it was the most common value, listed by 65% of them⁴. Lencioni points out that it was also one of Enron's values in its 2000 annual report². Unless you hold people to a visibly higher standard than most employers, he would call it permission-to-play.

Generic values guide nothing. The study's authors, Donald Sull and colleagues, note that McKesson's values (integrity, customer-first, excellence, respect and accountability) could apply equally well to an airline, grocery store or bank⁴. One fix they suggest is spelling out the behaviors each value asks for.

Netflix's culture memo does this for every value. Candor, for example, means "you willingly receive and give feedback"⁵ and "you admit mistakes openly and share learnings widely." Give each of your values five parts:

• A name in your own words
• A one-sentence definition you could judge an action against
• Two or three behaviors someone could see
• The cost: what you give up to keep it
• A real example, with where it came from

A value nobody is scored on is only advice. Lencioni says core values must be integrated into every employee-related process²: hiring, performance management, promotions and rewards, even dismissals. So give each value one interview question and one review criterion.

In interviews, ask every candidate the same question about past behavior, and agree in advance what a strong answer sounds like. The US Office of Personnel Management notes that more structured interviews show higher validity, more agreement between interviewers and less adverse impact⁶. A behavioral interview question bank shows the format, and the criteria belong in your performance review process.

Publishing doesn't make values real. Sull's team compared the published values of more than 500 large companies with over 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews. They found no correlation between the values a company emphasizes and how well employees say it lives up to them⁴. Gallup reported in 2022 that just 23% of US employees strongly agree¹ they can apply their organization's values to their work.

Recount the evidence once a year, before a review cycle. Move a value with no recent stories to the aspirational list, or retire it. Change scorecards only at the start of a hiring round or review cycle, and tell interviewers and managers what changed.

To skip tagging by hand, choose Edit with AI at the top of this page. River tags your records to each draft value, counts them, and checks which values your interview and review forms actually score.