Corporate Catering: Teaching Employees to Love Your Company Values
Posted by Amelia K. on Friday, October 24th, 2014 with 4 Comments
Having strong company values isn’t just a way to show what a business stands for. They’re a way to keep different departments on the same page, spark enthusiasm about your brand, and create a stronger connection between company and employees. But just having strong values doesn’t mean that your employees are automatically aware of them – or that they understand how their work can emulate these values on a daily basis.
Increasing employee awareness of your company’s values starts with communication. It involves the leaders of your brand emulating the same values that you expect your employees to work by. To help your staff truly make the company’s values a priority in their work also means you have to come up with creative ways to share the business’s vision and principles on a regular basis. So if your goal is to create a company culture that strives to showcase strong values through the work you do, where do you even start? We’ll walk you through the process – and show you how our corporate catering options can help supplement your efforts.
Using your company retreat as a place to explore how your staff uses the company’s values on a regular basis can help them figure out what the values mean to them and their work.
Image source: Flickr user Tatiana12
Lay out the language
Having unique, creative language for each of your values is the first step in creating something that sticks with your staff. How many times have you heard a company say “we value collaboration” or “we do quality work?” These are fairly boring, generic values that many employees consider to be outdated – meaning the likelihood that they’ll consider them when doing their work everyday is pretty low. But with that being said, your business probably does actually value collaboration and quality work. The key here is to find some creative language that evokes the same concept, but uses more effective wording to communicate. This will actually help to get your staff more excited about what the company stands for and make your values more memorable.
Using action words – like drive, create, and promote – are also great ways to push your team to actualize these principles in their work because they evoke a feeling of movement. For example, instead of saying, “we value collaboration,” you could say, “driving collaboration.” This will help your team to think about how they can help drive collaboration themselves. Encourage them to set up their own brainstorming meetings with colleagues or get input from different departments on a project. And instead of saying, “we do quality work,” you could instead say something along the lines of “moving to a higher standard.” This eliminates the sometimes trite use of the word “quality” and helps show that your company is always pushing for the next level of success. You can see how choosing the right language with your values is a key to success.
Share the love
Keeping your company values front of mind means going beyond just sharing how the business lived by these principles last year at your annual holiday party or a once-yearly state of the firm address. It means taking some creative measures to encourage your staff to use them on a daily basis. How you do this really depends on how large your company is. For example, one of the best ways to embed your values into the culture of your company is to have your staff talk about how they’ve seen the values at work within the business. This is scaleable based on your company’s size, and could be a rotating presentation at the beginning of a weekly staff meeting, or could be done by splitting your team into small groups to share their experiences, one value at a time.
You can also use quarterly catered lunches from Waiter.com as a space to give your leadership team the time to talk about how they’re seeing your values being implemented across the company and brainstorm new ideas to keep them front of mind for your staff throughout the year. At your annual retreat, consider splitting attendees into teams and have each team choose their favorite one to two values. They should then incorporate these values into a short skit (perhaps following a YouTube commercial format) to be presented in front of the group. It’s a great way to keep everyone having fun while really figuring out what the company’s values mean to them. And don’t forget to record the videos – not only can you use them for your in-house newsletters through the year to keep the values front of mind, they’re a great training tool when you hire new staff to illustrate how everyone at the company really loves and lives by these values.
Your company culture
One of the most important things to the future of your business – and boosting employee morale and loyalty – is your company culture. Figuring out how to best communicate what your business stands for and how your staff can incorporate these values into their work and even into their personal lives will help you instill a stronger bond between employees and get everyone thinking about how they can show your customers what the company stands for.
And when you really want to incentivize your team to live by the values your business emulates, Waiter.com’s corporate catering options can be a great way to bring your staff together and encourage them to share their ideas over some delicious, healthy food. To learn more, call us today – we’d love to support your efforts to deepen your team’s alliance to your business.
When it comes to feeding employees and coworkers, make your company's food program really count! If your workplace dining plan needs to take it up a notch — or if you don't have one at all — Waiter.com is here to help. From Virtual Cafeteria Service to diverse menus to local takeout & delivery, Waiter.com offers customizable dining solutions for every business and budget. Contact us today to get started!
On a somewhat related note, I’ve often found that the food and snacks available can really say something about the company culture, especially if you are new to that company. I worked for a company once, and the first time I went into the breakroom found it full of different teas and a variety of healthy snacks. That immediately indicated to me that this company was more open and progressive, which in fact they were.
That’s a great point – are you still working there today?
I once worked for a company that promoted values by attaching them to their reviews. Part of your annual increase was whether or not your participated and followed the company values. They were also put into a handy acronym so they were easy to remember.
I’ve seen this before – some companies ask you to outline in advance how you’ve worked and lived by the values of the business throughout the previous year.