The hollow truth about company values

In the mid 1990s I worked for a company that announced its new values one Monday morning.

They were framed on the wall, written by management, and meant nothing to the rest of us because no one had explained them or asked what we thought.

That was my first experience of what I now think of as the hollow truth about company values: they sound important, but they rarely mean anything to the people expected to live by them.

Three decades later, not much has changed.

In 2022, the University of Oxford’s, Oxford Character Project published the UK Business Values Survey. It analysed 221 UK organisations including large private firms and public-sector bodies, to understand how company values are defined and implemented.

Eighty-two per cent said their values were defined by senior leadership, and only eighteen per cent involved employees in the process. The most frequently listed values were integrity, collaboration and excellence, while more human-centred ideas such as humility and gratitude were rarely included.

The researchers concluded that UK companies tend to emphasise instrumental and performance-driven values over relational or moral ones — in other words, they focus on what makes a business look competent and successful, rather than on the qualities that build trust and integrity.

How values are supposed to work

Values are meant to describe how people make decisions and interact with one another at work. They are the reference point for behaviour when rules or policies don’t cover every situation. When embedded properly, they guide thousands of small choices each day — how people speak to customers, handle mistakes, and resolve conflict.

Values work only when they are:

1. Co-created — developed with input from across the organisation so that people recognise themselves in the language.

2. Lived by leaders — modelled in daily behaviour; if leadership breaks the values, they collapse.

3. Reinforced through systems — reflected in hiring, promotion, recognition and reward structures.

4. Visible in decisions — used as a test for what the company will and won’t do.

Without these conditions, values are simply wallpaper.

How they should be deployed and managed

Most companies write values as statements of intent and stop there. That’s why they fail. The point isn’t to decide what the values are — it’s to make them work. Values only matter when they influence decisions, shape management, and show up in everyday behaviour. That requires structure.

If values are going to mean anything, they have to move from words to working practice. That takes deliberate design. The organisations that make values real tend to follow a few simple but consistent steps:

1. Discovery, not declaration. Start by identifying what already defines the organisation when it is at its best. Workshops, interviews and observation produce language that feels real, not aspirational.

2. Translate values into behaviours. Each value needs a description of what it looks like in practice. “Integrity” might mean “we tell clients when we’ve made a mistake and fix it.” Specific examples make values usable.

3. Embed them in people processes. Recruitment, onboarding, appraisal and recognition should all use the same behavioural definitions. This is how values become part of management, not messaging.

4. Hold leadership to them. When senior people breach the values, address it openly. The organisation learns that the rules apply equally, which is where credibility begins.

What happens when it’s done properly

Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Institute of Business Ethics shows that companies where values are embedded and modelled by leaders report:

• Higher employee trust and engagement.

• Stronger retention and lower misconduct rates.

• Greater alignment between brand promise and customer experience.

In practice, when values are co-created and lived, they reduce friction, simplify decisions and create a shared sense of purpose. They act as a social contract.

Why this matters for recruitment and retention

Candidates and employees notice when there’s a difference between what a company says and what it does. They see the words on a careers page, they hear them repeated in interviews, and then they experience something else when they start the job.

We hear it from candidates all the time. They say the culture they joined wasn’t the one they were told about. The values on the website didn’t show up in how people behaved day to day. Once that happens, trust goes. People stop feeling part of something and start looking elsewhere.

Values aren’t meant to be slogans that make a company sound good. Their real purpose is to set expectations for how people will behave toward one another and make decisions day to day. When those expectations aren’t met, it damages both recruitment and retention.