Remember those values on your wall?
Pre-Pandemic, we remember those companies who had their values thrown all over their walls or poetically painted for the perfect “first day of work” Instagram photo. Remember when we were “polite” about inappropriate comments or jokes because they were in a fleeting moment through a doorway, over drinks at a company party, or other people laughed so we rationalized its oppression?
Well not anymore! Enter 2021, meet the new workplace, she’s seamless, she’s sleek, she’s paperless, and she's live. With the reliance of Slack, Zoom, Google, and more all our words, mistakes, accidents, jokes, and values have been called into question. If those cute values felt distant before they are under a microscope now.
Our new workplaces ask us to rise to the occasion and embrace a brave and unknown culture of equity, all the while we document and timestamp every keystroke. People are keeping receipts, counting the likes, and timing their company’s reaction and action time to current events.
If you feel like your company is failing, drowning, or completely unprepared for this new era of work, I can most commonly point the problem to a lack of lived values. Living your values is the idea of moving beyond knowledge and into practice. Daily assesses if each word - like empathy, clarity, innovation - is pushing you or pulling you towards a better workplace.
Hear me out, I know you might have paid a lot of money to have those values. You spent all that time articulating, voting, and printing those chosen words but what are values if they are never put to practice?
You can say you aspire to be the world’s best basketball player, but even Michael Jordan practiced daily. He knew there was no arriving, no completing, no final destination to know you are the world’s best. It’s a value, which by nature means you are deciding to exhibit or change behaviors in hopes of becoming that idea.
When it comes to being a leader at this time and in this current work environment we must ask ourselves are the values we currently hold going to allow us to grow, strive, push, adapt? Or are our values simply tasks we can check off and wish upon our "lower-level" employees to uphold?
These quarantine months have been a time of refinement. Sometimes you take the L (loss) for the future W (win). Leaders, are you ready to hold a magnifying glass to your stated company values? Are you ready to throw some values out to let in some new ones? Are you ready to refine your values to our employees’ current needs? Are you ready to practice?
