Your Company Values Are Lying to Your Employees (And They Know It)

Your company has values. They're on the website, probably framed in the office, definitely in the onboarding deck. They're words like "Integrity," "Innovation," "Collaboration," and possibly one that's been turned into a slightly forced acronym.

And your employees? They can't recite them without looking them up.

Which, honestly, is the kindest possible outcome. The alternative is that they can recite them — and find them absolutely hilarious, in a not-good way.

This is the values gap. And it's more common, and more expensive, than most organisations want to admit.

Why Values Programmes Go Wrong

There are two ways values go wrong. The first is that they were written by a committee and have no connection to how the business actually operates. The second is that they're fine on paper, but nothing in the day-to-day experience of working there reinforces them.

Either way, your employees are doing the maths. If the company says it values "People First" and then announces redundancies via a company-wide email at 5pm, people notice. And they don't forget.

Values aren't what you put on a wall. They're what you do when it's inconvenient.

So how do you close the gap? Not with another all-hands presentation. With a campaign.

1. The "Caught You Living Our Values" Campaign

The Problem: Values recognition is usually top-down, formal, and feels a bit like getting a gold star from a teacher you've met twice.

The Campaign: Launch a peer-driven, values-linked recognition scheme where anyone can nominate anyone else for "living a value" that week. Keep it light, specific, and visible — a Slack channel, a digital board, a weekly shoutout. Crucially, tie each nomination to an actual story, not just the word "collaboration."

Why it works: Values become real when people can see them in action. Stories are how humans make sense of abstract concepts. Give people the stories.

2. The "What Does Integrity Actually Look Like Here" Content Series

The Problem: Abstract values mean different things to different people. Without definition, people fill the gap with their own assumptions — or roll their eyes.

The Campaign: For each value, create a short, specific, "here's what this looks like in our world" content piece. Not a definition. An example. Two or three real scenarios. Feature real people where you can. Run one value per month.

Why it works: Specificity is the enemy of cynicism. When you give people concrete examples of what a value means in their context, it stops being a poster and starts being useful.

3. The Leadership Behaviour Audit

The Problem: You can run all the campaigns in the world, but if the people at the top are visibly not living the values, it's game over.

The Campaign: This one's internal and possibly uncomfortable: run an anonymous audit of how values show up (or don't) in leadership behaviour. Feed the results back. Create a genuine accountability plan. Then communicate it. You don't have to share every detail — but showing the organisation that you took it seriously? That's a values moment in itself.

Why it works: Trust is built on evidence, not aspiration. Showing your team that values go all the way to the top — or that you're actively working on it — does more for culture than any poster ever will.

The takeaway

Values aren't a branding exercise. They're a promise you're making to your people every single day. If you're not actively living them and communicating about them, they become a liability, not an asset.

The good news is, a targeted internal campaign can start to close that gap faster than you think.

[Let's build a values activation campaign your people will actually believe in]