Values in Action: How Mission-Driven Companies Operationalize Core Values (And Avoid Culture Washing)

Hey everybody, it's Alex from Recognize. I'm here to talk about something near and dear to my heart, which is company values and how they can tie into recognition.

The reason I love company values, personally, is it feels like a framework or a programming language to your culture. It can help drive all the decisions in your organization.

And I think so many companies miss the mark when their values are simply "integrity" or "innovation." We're going to talk about how to improve things like that in this conversation. I have a lot of great content, a lot of great stats, and we will be sending this presentation afterwards, which I think you should definitely take to your leadership.

It has a lot of good stuff, you'll see. It's about 20 or so slides.

But I'd love to, as we kick in, I know we're going to have a smaller group today, a more intimate group, which is great. I love intimate groups. It allows us to maybe have more of a conversation in the chat. So, in the chat, introduce yourself.

Where are you coming in from?

Maybe share what your weekend plans are. Something fun.

What am I doing this weekend? Trying to remember. Friday night, I'll be at my friend's cabin. I'll be with my childhood friends, friends I've had since first grade.

So we're going to be making, some of us are picky eaters, so the best thing to do is make burritos. Bring all the ingredients, you can put whatever you want into your burrito.

So that's what we're doing Friday night. Not sure this weekend, maybe go see my mom. You know, I'm near Canada, so one of my friends is up near Vancouver camping, so I may go up there this weekend.

But I'd love to hear where people are coming in from.

Hey, Linda, that's awesome, your niece's wedding! That's so much fun. I love weddings, especially when the next generation is getting married, so that's very cool. Very cool.

North Vancouver, you know what I'm talking about. I'll probably... I might be in Squamish this weekend, camping, with one of my climbing partners, so that's really cool. Love the Vancouver area. You know, there's a reason why Vancouver is considered one of the best cities in the world.

Anna, nice to have you on as well, Central Florida, just like Jess. That's awesome. So jealous that you have a pool that you can go to.

If it's your pool, that's awesome. Friend's pool, that's also awesome.

And, yeah, it should be good weather. Hope the air quality is good, too. It's a little smoky up high. The air quality down low is good, but up high is a little bad here in the Seattle area.

Wow, lake cottage with in-laws and outlaws, I love that. It's always awesome to have that access to some kind of cabin or something like that.

You know, what's so beautiful about these days is there's so many programs where you can use Airbnb to rent a cabin. You don't need to own a cabin. Or yesterday, I was on a friend's boat, but it's not his boat. They do the boat share.

How great is that? Instead of having to own a boat, the mortgage, the maintenance, they can pick a different boat. And I guess it's $3,000 a year, and they can get unlimited access to boats all year round, which is pretty cool.

But yeah, so if anyone else wants to share, please do. We're going to have a couple polls in the conversation to see where you're at with values, with recognition, and then ultimately how I did at the end of the presentation, you're going to have a chance to rate my presentation.

But I hope that I'm able to deliver, because this content is awesome.

Why should you listen to me at all? Well...

A lot of the content I'll be providing is based off research, so... but who am I? I'm Alex Grande, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Recognize. It's an employee recognition program based off of your company values. It's social, it's in Microsoft Teams.

And I'm going to talk about why we made those decisions a little bit in the presentation. Why is it embedded? Why does it use the values? And so forth.

I have a background in psychology. I'm super passionate about the employee experience, and that's why we are here today.

So, please connect with me online. There's a QR code. Take a picture with your phone, I'll give you a moment to do that.

Jess, my colleague here on the call, she's now sharing my LinkedIn right on cue, and we'll be able to share my calendar link later on. We can always... I have a 15-minute and a 30-minute calendar.

And you can just meet with me for 15 minutes. I love to meet with people. I've been trying to meet with 3 or 4 HR directors or CHROs every week. It's been my goal this year.

So please connect with me. Love to talk to you more.

So, without further ado...

What are we talking about here?

Most leadership teams regularly invest significant capital into things like weekend retreats, branded swag, corporate offsites, to define core operational values.

But an inherent flaw exists in this traditional paradigm. Culture is framed as a static, periodic event, rather than an ongoing operational system.

When core values reside exclusively on corporate posters, career pages, or quarterly slide decks, you know what I'm talking about, right? Employees perceive them as executive aspirations rather than everyday expectations.

This disconnect creates cultural drift, a progressive separation between stated corporate philosophy and daily operational reality.

Over time, this gap creates workplace cynicism and psychological detachment.

So, to build a high-performing organization, leadership must translate from passive value definition to active behavioral operationalization, embedding values into everyday recognition.

So that's what we're going to be talking about here.

We're going to talk about... we're going to diagnose the problem, we're going to provide a behavioral framework, we're going to talk about how we can use technology and execution, and then we're going to talk about how to measure and implement something in the next 90 days.

I'm going to give you a roadmap in the end.

Okay, so let's ground our discussion in research from Gallup's core value audit. While most enterprise organizations maintain formal core values, analytics reveal a severe disconnect in the execution.

Surprisingly, only 27% of employees strongly believe that their company values are working.

23% strongly agree that they apply those values to their everyday work, so...

You know, we want more than only a quarter of your staff to be using company values. This means nearly three-quarters of your workforce operate in a values vacuum, as we call it.

When faced with difficult client decisions or operational pressures, workers default to local team habits and immediate speed demands. Without daily reinforcement, organizational alignment dissolves during strategic pivots or market volatility.

I think we all know what we're talking about there.

Here's a poll on company values.

So, we all have values for the most part.

But are they regularly being referenced?

I was at a conference not too long ago, and people were like, "I met these two people at the same company, like, oh yeah, our values. It's integrity, let me try and remember."

Clearly, they don't have a recognition program promoting their values.

But anyway, how are your values? Again, I know we're a small team today, but I'd love to hear from the group on the topic.

So, how many... do you have values, do you not?

Do you need them, or are they not important?

The thing is, you have values whether you like it or not. That's the thing. You have a culture whether or not you design it.

So, the survey says...

86% of the people in this room say that they regularly reinforce and reference these values. That's awesome. Nobody says no, that's great.

And one of you says yes, but no one knows about them.

So, this is great. Sounds like we're talking to the right people here. You know, it's always good to maybe test that to make sure, stress that in surveys or things like that, to make sure that they really do understand them.

So, what's the problem here?

Disengagement is not just a human resources concern.

It is a direct financial drain. According to Gallup and BambooHR, global employee engagement sits at around 20%.

This disengagement costs the global economy around $500 billion. It says up to $10 trillion, which I think is kind of a... way too large of a range, the research. I think it's, you know, probably more on the lower end, in lost productivity.

Furthermore, around 16% of workers are actively disengaged, actively spreading negativity or undermining peers.

Conversely, the financial return on culture is striking. The top quadrant, engaged business units, achieve 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity, rather, and 18% higher sales and 10% higher customer loyalty compared to disengaged bottom-quartile units.

So, let's define culture washing.

We define culture washing as the practice of aggressively promoting human-centric, purpose-driven values in recruiting and marketing while maintaining an internal environment of toxic management, unrewarded, overworked, or systematic misalignment.

Sounds like this group doesn't have that problem, which is great, but that does exist out there, and it's, you know, oftentimes the companies that have culture washing are the ones that aren't really interested in company employee recognition to begin with.

Let's keep going here.

When new hires encounter a contradiction between onboarding values and daily reality, the psychological contract snaps. Workers quickly experience disillusionment, leading to malicious compliance and lowered effort.

When senior leaders preach integrity during town halls, but consistently promote low-integrity high performers, I think we've seen that somewhere in our career, workers recognize that values are mere rhetoric, pushing values-aligned talent directly out the door.

This reminds me of a story. We read a book in our book club here at Recognize on company values, and it talked about how they had a, you know, value of "no jerks," right?

But this one person was a jerk.

And they said, "Hey, what's with that guy?"

"Well, he's a high performer."

"Okay, that's fine, but then remove the 'no jerks work here' value, because obviously you tolerate that, and thus it's not really a value."

Moving on.

So, groundbreaking research published by the MIT Sloan Management Review analyzed 34 million employee profiles and 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews.

Their findings challenge the assumption that turnover is primarily about pay.

Their data proves that toxic corporate culture is 10 times more powerful than compensation in predicting employee turnover.

Toxicity is driven by failures in diversity, equity, and inclusion, which we had a great conversation with Dr. Don last week about.

Workers feel disrespected, and then thus there's bad behavior.

Notice the fourth row here. Fourth column, rather.

Failure to recognize performance is around 3 times more predictive in voluntary attrition than base compensation. So, failing to distinguish high performers from laggards directly drives top talent away.

There's a great book by Dan Pink called *Drive*. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. You can listen to it on Audible, or buy it.

It's an older book now, it's been around for, I don't know, over 10 years. But it's a great book, and I think it's still relevant today.

So, essentially, core values...

For core values to govern behavior, they must align with basic human psychology. So, rooted in self-determination theory and Dan Pink's motivational framework, sustainable engagement relies on autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

With social recognition serving as an operational engine for purpose, right?

And also in Recognize, we embed the idea of autonomy. You know, a lot of people ask, "Hey, we want to give a specific award, a specific gift for certain accomplishments."

Well, why don't you just let them pick what they want?

Like, people want autonomy. I think we... if you have any children in your life, like the... one of the people here with their niece.

And when they're younger, it's like, okay, do you want apples, or do you want carrots, right? It's not "eat your vegetables." It gives them a sense of autonomy, right, while still guiding them to the right decision.

Anyway, research from Achievers and CARET, they found that appreciated employees are 12 times more likely to find their daily work deeply meaningful, and recognized employees are a striking 56 times more likely to feel strongly connected to the core values.

And 50% of appreciated workers see a long-term career path at their company, compared to just 3% of unappreciated staff.

Furthermore, studies by Recognize show that regular value-driven appreciation reduces workforce turnover by around 64%.

Values fail administratively when defined using vague nouns like "integrity" and "customer first."

Without a behavioral taxonomy, we must translate abstract concepts into explicit, observable behaviors.

So, looking at our matrix here.

Here... so, for instance, "customer first" can become "proactively resolves cross-departmental bottlenecks," right?

Or "agility and innovation" becomes "identifies redundant manual steps."

"Integrity and security" becomes "identifies and escalates compliance risks or data vulnerabilities before a system failure."

And then you can become, instead of "integrity" or "security," "Fraud Buster."

"Agility and innovation" becomes "Evolution."

We have an app, a free tool, and if you email me, I can send it to you, that allows you to design your company values, design your recognition program.

Oftentimes we talk about this idea of sub-values, so you may have top-level integrity.

But what are the values below that?

Within that, like evolution. Innovation, like any idea, is a good idea.

And you can be promoting these ideas in something like Recognize, where you can upload them every quarter, and have different kinds of concepts being recognized, while still always coming back to what your core values are.

Direct managers sit at the intersection of strategic intent and daily execution.

Gallup data shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement, yet 58% of disengaged workers point to passive, complacent leaders as our primary frustration.

So, culture reinforcement cannot succeed as a centralized HR program. It requires activating people like your frontline managers.

Equipping managers with structured recognition tools yields immediate results, right?

Companies with strong appreciation habits see 31% lower voluntary turnover.

So, traditional corporate recognition relies on episodic milestone awards, right?

75% of companies have that 5-year, 10-year, or that top-down manual recognition on an annual basis.

These legacy programs are backward-looking and fail to influence day-to-day work.

To build an active culture, organizations must pivot to continuous peer-to-peer social recognition systems.

Data shows that nearly 70% of enterprise organizations are actively exploring peer-to-peer recognition programs. Whether or not they actually move forward with things is a different question.

But peer-to-peer recognition creates that real-time feedback, making daily contributions visible across departments and transforming appreciation into a continuous operational habit.

And I think a lot of companies fail to see this, because oftentimes recognition does end up on the back burner, you know, as other priorities have come up.

We hear that a lot, because they don't fully grasp how important this really is.

To operationalize core values systematically, we implement a four-pillar framework here at Recognize.

So, codify: translate broad corporate values into role-specific behavioral taxonomies.

Second, embed, right?

You want it inside Teams. You want it inside SharePoint, or Outlook, or Slack, right?

If you have frontline workers, you want it within SMS. You want to be able to text message automatically, recognition or reminding someone to complete that nomination for the end of the quarter.

And then recognize, right?

So, embed peer-to-peer and manager recognition to issue public value-tagged badges accompanied by mandatory messages.

Or, like on Recognize, we have custom questions based off of the value, and I'll give some examples later.

And then lastly, analyze.

So, continuously track your company values, evaluate your cultural health, spot team silos, and correlate quarterly activity with retention and unit profitability and productivity.

Okay, so the third module, technology and execution.

So, workforce fragmentation creates distinct cultural challenges.

Gallup shows remote workers and hybrid staff report higher engagement than on-site workers, but I think we have all seen the reports that remote work leads to daily loneliness.

Meanwhile, deskless frontline workers in healthcare, manufacturing, or retail, they often lack, you know, that corporate email or desk access, risking that kind of detachment that we want to avoid.

So, recognition technology, like Recognize, we bridge the gap.

For instance, for desktop teams, we have it inside Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, and Slack.

Frontline teams, we have it in the mobile apps, on iOS or Android, SMS.

Or, you know, we have digital displays for the break room or on the factory floor.

Also, what's great about something like Recognize, it's on your phone if you have SharePoint or Teams or Slack, right? Because those things work on the phone and on the desktop, and those include the integrations, like Recognize.

So, again, platforms like Recognize, we help digitize those abstract principles into company value badges.

These badges act as visual markers that can make corporate priorities tangible, right?

So administrators customize the badge artwork.

By the way, for company values, we just launched a free tool to create your own badges as well. AI is awesome at it.

We also have a badge builder. We have over 200 graphics you can choose from to symbolize your values, but again, you can create custom ones now with Recognize through our badge builder.

And these badges are really cool.

We came up with this idea, originally, to incorporate values because it creates a more meaningful connection with your values.

Also, on our team specifically, every quarter, one of our employees redesigns our badges. Same values, but new badges.

So, for instance, this summer, we went on a company retreat.

It was in the mountains here in Washington, and we created, or they created, a series of Bigfoot-themed badges and camping-themed badges for the summer, which is really fun. It makes things interesting.

So, anyway, you customize the artwork, you can create point weights, you can require approval from managers.

And, you know, so for instance, sending a "Surprise and Delight" badge can require the sender to complete additional questions, right?

"Describe a specific action this employee took to exceed customer expectations."

So you can ask custom survey questions per badge.

It's not just a message. It's more than that, more meaningful.

Mandatory context prevents superficial posts and ensures recognition remains authentic, which is so important.

Every badge feeds into public recognition as well, so it's automatically posted to Microsoft Teams, to Slack, to our website, to the TVs you have in your break room, and that allows it to become... these success stories become enterprise-wide.

So, the leading cause of software adoption failure, right, especially in HR projects, is portal fatigue, requiring employees to log in to a separate website, remember another tab to have open, just to send a recognition.

Which, we do try to push managers to think about this as win logging.

These are wins you want to be able to remember in that performance review.

And using AI, we're able to summarize recognitions that someone received from peers, from the manager, into that performance review.

So it's just one less thing managers have to do every 6 months, depending on how much you do performance reviews.

Recognize eliminates the adoption friction through those integrations.

So, collaboration tools, right? Employees see and view recognitions directly in Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint.

We have HRIS synchronization, so real-time user sync with things like Workday or Azure, ADP, or just simply an FTP connection, if you're familiar with that.

That way, you know, HR has one less thing they have to do to maintain user data. You don't want to have to do that.

If you have any programs in your life right now that require you to manually upload spreadsheets of users, get rid of it, if you can.

Or come to me, and we'll talk about how to automate that, even if it has nothing to do with recognition.

But these automated syncs guarantee that there's clean data, clean analytics, and that, you know, when someone's recognized, the right manager is notified.

In addition to daily peer recognition, organizations require structured mechanisms for those quarterly awards.

Safety drives, annual galas, automated nomination campaigns.

Execute these drives with less work for you as administrators.

So campaign tools streamline the nomination lifecycle. Scheduled workflows, preview portals, crowdsource intelligence, are all part of the game.

So you want to have these things be meaningful, as we say, meaningful, but automated.

One of our customers I recognize is Metro Bank.

So, to see this in practice, like Metro Bank, they're a high-growth UK retail bank. They're really fun. If you're ever in the UK, go check them out. They have a great culture.

And they've operationalized its customer-first culture throughout their branch network.

Using Recognize, Metro Bank implemented 9 custom core values reflected through their philosophy.

Things like Exceeded Expectations, Inspire and Nurture, Surprise and Delight, Zest, and One Team, along with their executive-only Metro Man badge.

So, if you get a Metro Man badge, you know it's meaningful, and you know only certain people can send it, and they can only send it a certain number of times per year.

So, you know, in Recognize, we allow you to have scarcity to make things more meaningful.

And they integrated directly into Viva Engage, previously called Yammer, and staff submitted 341,000 recognitions over the first 5 years of working with us, maintaining a velocity of around 500 recognitions per week.

As a result, Metro Bank earned Glassdoor's Best Place to Work, HR Excellence Award, Most People-Focused CEO.

Look him up, he's hilarious, he's got this really adorable dog.

And top national ratings for customer service in the UK.

And that's what we want to do for all of our customers.

Operationalizing values converts culture into measurable, data-driven discipline.

So, executive dashboards can track key engagement indicators in real time, right?

Surveys are lagging indicators. Recognition is a leading indicator.

So, value adoption velocity, manager activation rates, and then using EMPs to be able to correlate the recognition from two actual Net Promoter Scores.

I'd love to hear if anyone wants to share their tips on employee surveys, or how to get more participation in employee surveys. Put it in the chat.

It's always a question, is how to get people to do the surveys.

And of course, we always, as we talk about, you know, in other webinars, if you do a survey, you want to at least take one action per survey, so that your staff feel like they're really being listened to and things are actually happening.

But I think people are, can, you know, you want to just, you know, let them know, give you grace if you can't do everything, and you can't satisfy everybody, just like the temperature in the office, right?

The thermostat is always going to be a contentious issue, because people are always going to be different.

So, we're actually rounding it out, and so I'm really excited to be able to get through a lot of this in about 30 minutes, but if we have any Q&A or anything like that, we can get to it.

But I have been going a little fast. I am passionate about it.

Here's a couple things we can do starting today.

We want to be able to incorporate company values into your recognition program.

In the next 90 days, you can spend the next 30 days codifying and designing your program.

Conduct that core value audit. Translate values into behavior taxonomies.

Make sure that you have an HRIS sync, so you don't have to manage user configuration.

Set up the badges and the rules. It's super easy, you can do that within a day with our platform.

Now, also...

I think I have the poll for the next slide, but please tell me, you know, tell me about your company recognition program.

Do you have the values integrated, or not?

Or maybe it's ad hoc.

I've been talking to a lot of people, as I mentioned before, and a lot of people just leave it to the managers.

"We leave it to the managers."

Well, which managers are then doing a good job?

How many are giving out money, or bonuses, or gift cards, and it's not being taxed?

You know, can you correlate the managers who are doing it well with productivity?

So, awesome, yeah, 57%, so more than half of you have a recognition program with values. Fantastic.

0% have, of the 7 who participated, 0% have a recognition program without values, and yeah, some of you have... I'm sure more of you who submitted, let's be honest, have an ad hoc recognition program that's unofficial.

And a couple of you don't have a recognition program at all, so it's always interesting to see the results.

Thanks a lot.

But yeah, so then after the first 30 days of codifying and designing a program, we can move into a pilot.

And so if you already have one and have values, that's awesome. You're already far along, but you can always re-look at things.

You know, the reason why we often make decisions, and then we just... that's a decision we move forward, is if we are always having to come up with new, or revisit decisions, it's mentally taxing.

So, that's why we use heuristics. That's why we have biases, because it's a lot easier to navigate the world and a lot less strain when we can use our biases, our heuristics, and that's why we are the way we are.

But sometimes it's good to step back and look at everything from the ground up.

But the last is, from 60 to 90 days, is to take what you've learned from the pilot and go company-wide.

You know, we talk to a lot of customers or companies that they think they have to just go immediately company-wide, they get overwhelmed, and then thus they don't do anything, and an inaction occurs.

But why not just have one department, one team, do whatever new programs you're doing? Recognition, wellness, whatever it is, and then you can go to the leaders and say, "Hey, we did an A/B test. We had one group do it, we had another group not do it, here's the results."

Leadership cannot deny when you do A/B testing, and of course, being data-driven is always a strength.

So, to wrap up the webinar, building a values-driven organization requires committing to three executive imperatives.

Reject the culture washing, right? So align internal recognition with your branding.

Embed internal branding, not just external, but internal as well.

Embed values in everyday workflows. Sounds like a lot of you are already doing that. Awesome.

Integrate cultural reinforcement directly into daily work, not only on the desktop, but also on the phone, on the mobile.

Measure and manage behavioral adoption.

One thing I didn't ask is, you know, whether or not you're actually getting any data out of your recognition program.

Are you using it as leading indicators? Definitely something to look at.

Leverage that real-time people analytics, track usage, track the values, and use that to track and predict future productivity, and potentially churn among certain departments.

And you want to leverage tools like Recognize to translate core values into observable behaviors and to celebrate them daily.

And there's more than ever what you can do with something like Recognize.

Every month, we do an all-hands meeting.

And normally I go through the company values, the recognitions that have occurred in the last month, but I wanted to inspire our CTO to come up with new ideas on how to utilize AI for this, and he put together this incredible report that we shared with the whole company, and we're planning on embedding that into Recognize.

And so AI and recognition has never been better.

I don't believe in using AI to write... just completely compose a message, because then it's inauthentic.

Yes, we can help you write a better message, but the best uses of AI with something like Recognize is that real-time data that you're collecting.

So again, I: codify, embed, recognize, analyze.

That's the four things that we need to be doing in our system.

We have one more poll. How did I do? Let's put that up.

But while you're doing that we're actually doing one more webinar, and then we're switching to doing a podcast. We're going to be interviewing HR leaders.

If you want to be on our podcast, it's just going to be a 15-minute interview with me.

So if you want to do that, please let us know. You can write it in the chat. We'd love to connect with you, we'd love to have you as a guest in the future.

So we're going to be doing one more webinar, things like this, where it's like a presentation style that goes for about 30 minutes or 45 minutes.

And that's going to be next week, right? Or, no, in 2 weeks.

On August 25th, "Connecting Hybrid Corporate Staff to Desk with Frontline Workers."

So if you have frontline workers, please come and check that out.

Or if you have hybrid staff as well.

So, we're really passionate about hybrid. We're a remote team, so we're really... we care a lot about that.

And we've created a lot of fun tools to do that. Things like Fishbowl and other games, which we'll be sharing on our website soon.

So come to that, register for that, it's on our website, easy to find.

It's recognizeapp.com/campus.

All past webinars are there, and our customer success team does webinars every month, too. We'll continue to do those, so if you are a customer of Recognize or want to become one, we do webinars every month teaching you how to use the latest features.

I'm going to be doing a demo with Jess. This will be walking you through what Recognize looks like, how you can use Recognize for your recognition program.

It's really fun. We actually give away a $50 gift card to somebody who joins.

So, if 20 people come, you have a really good chance of winning that 50 bucks compared to, let's say, doing like a lotto ticket or something like that.

And if you become a customer through that, I'll give you $500 for your rewards to kick it off and be able to give money to your... or rewards to your staff immediately.

But it's really fun. We have challenges, nominations, recognition, anniversaries, all the main things you'd want in a recognition program.

And then it lives inside Slack, it lives inside Teams, it lives inside the mobile app.

Thanks, everyone, for coming.

This has been a super fun last 30 minutes. I hope you got something out of it. Seems like you did, according to the poll.

And I hope to see you in the near future, either one-on-one with me, or in our live webinar, or in our live demo.

And look to hearing more about *The Work Shift*, our upcoming podcast, which we're announcing right now.

First time announcing our new podcast we're going to be doing called *The Work Shift*.