Align employee values before hiring

The cost of misaligned values in the workplace

Rather than struggling to align the values of your employees and the business, in an attempt to forge more productive teams, the smarter approach is to focus on values when recruiting to ensure new hires are already a great fit.

As a long time business consultant, I can tell you something for free: it's no secret that workplace disharmony hurts the bottom line in a myriad of ways.

I've seen time and again those teams who don't actually work well as a team, or don't align well with the needs of the business, and experience low productivity. The impact is even worse if they're in customer-facing roles which could affect sales.

Beyond this damage, I've seen conflict due to poorly aligned values result in high employee turnover – which also takes a serious toll in terms of morale and productivity. The need to constantly train a sea of new faces is demoralising and, after a while, even your star performers start looking around for another job and it gets harder to attract new talent.

Why hiring for cultural fit matters

Value Systems Alignment offers a way to tackle this challenge, by addressing areas where values and goals of employees are not in step with those of the business.

The idea is not to brainwash your people into towing the company line, but rather to find a common ground so everyone can work towards the same goals.

An example of Value Systems Alignment might be addressing the impact of disgruntled employees slacking off with a resulting drop in productivity.

Asking your employees to change their behaviour for "for the good of the business" isn't going to work if they feel that helping the business doesn't align with their own values and needs. 

Initiatives like performance bonuses or profit sharing, which give employees a vested interest in success, can offer a way to align the values and needs of employees and the business to ensure a better outcome for all.

Companies with rigid 'command and control' mindsets, which treat employees as little more than work units, can struggle to acknowledge that offering a carrot is often a wiser course of action than reaching for a stick.

Related article: The impact of poor candidate fit

Of course, you're constantly fighting an uphill battle if many of your employees lack the right attitudes, temperament and cultural fit for their team and your wider organisation.

That's not an uncommon problem if you've been hiring people by simply skimming through their resumes, rather than really getting to know them.

Instead of investing a lot of time and effort into constantly striking peace deals within the business, it makes a lot more sense to nip the problem in the bud by ensuring that you hire people who are already a great fit.

How Expr3ss! helps build aligned teams

That's where Expr3ss! comes to the rescue, using short surveys to help you quickly and cost-effectively pinpoint job applicants with not just the right skills, but also the right attitudes, temperament and cultural fit. 

The surveys typically take around six minutes, and include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications and certifications before they are recommended for an interview.

As a business consultant who was paid a lot of money to put dysfunctional teams through expensive programmes, I can tell you that it's a lot cheaper and easier to use Exp3ss! to ensure you're building great teams from the beginning.

Hiring people with the right attitudes, so your teams fit together perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle, makes a lot more sense than hiring blindly and then trying to force the pieces together.

To be fair, that doesn't sound like much help if you're struggling to work with the people you've already hired. The good news is that Expr3ss! can still help you going forward.

The Exp3ss! Checklist Survey helps you get a better understanding of your existing people, teams and wider business. This makes it easy to find the right fit when hiring new employees.

Be warned, you'll make things worse if you try to change the business culture overnight by bringing in new people who have the right attitudes but aren't a great fit.

Related article: Poor candidate fit: Symptoms vs problems

If you drop a soft and cuddly new employee into a high-pressure environment full of abrasive co-workers, that existing team will likely chew them up and spit them out. Instead, you need to change the mix gradually to shift the culture of the team – which is another area when Expr3ss! can help.

If you're constantly striving to align employees and business values in order to keep the peace, you're doing things the hard way. Using Expr3ss! to hire more strategically, with a greater focus on attitudes and temperament, ensures that your people work better as a team to the benefit of everyone.