10 Core Values Examples That Drive Employee Engagement

MIT Sloan researchers analyzed 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews across 562 large companies with published values statements and found no correlation between the values a company advertises and how well employees say it lives them (Sull, Turconi & Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review, July 2020). Four values, including collaboration and customer orientation, correlated negatively.

The words on the wall are not the problem. The words are just labels. What separates a value that changes behavior from one that decorates a lobby is whether it names a specific thing people do, and whether anyone checks.

Core values are the short list of collective behaviors an organization commits to so people make consistent decisions when nobody is available to ask.

This guide started as ten values. It now covers 25 examples of core values in the workplace, organized by company stage, because the values that hold a 30-person company together will quietly break a 300-person one. Each example gives you three things: the value statement, the behavior it actually drives, and the signal that tells you it is working.

One formatting rule runs through all 25. Every value statement is written as "We," never "I." People rate a collective more accurately than they rate themselves. "I tell the truth early" invites self-flattery. "We tell the truth early" is a claim a team can be honestly wrong about, which makes it measurable.

Examples of core values in the workplace: early stage, under 50 employees

At this size everyone can see everyone. Your values should protect the two things scale destroys first: speed of information and direct contact with customers.

1. We tell people the bad news first

Behavior it drives: Problems travel upward the same day they are noticed, before anyone has a fix ready. The instinct to arrive with a solution gets deliberately overridden.

How you would know it is working: Measure hours between a problem being noticed and leadership hearing about it. Under 24 is healthy. If leaders consistently learn about issues after they are resolved, the value is dead.

2. We ship before we are ready, then fix it in public

Behavior it drives: Rough releases with visible iteration beat polished releases behind closed doors. Nobody sits on work waiting for it to be defensible.

How you would know it is working: Release count per month, and the ratio of fixes logged publicly versus quietly. Silence after launch is the failure signal.

3. We answer customers ourselves

Behavior it drives: Engineers, designers, and founders take support shifts. Nobody is more than one step removed from the person paying.

How you would know it is working: Percentage of the team that handled at least one live customer conversation last quarter. Below 60% and the company is already abstracting.

4. We write the decision down, even when only three people were in the room

Behavior it drives: Short written decision notes with the reasoning attached, not just the outcome.

How you would know it is working: A person hired last month can reconstruct why a decision was made without asking anyone. That test is binary and takes ten minutes to run.

5. We say no out loud

Behavior it drives: Requests get declined explicitly instead of dying quietly in a backlog.

How you would know it is working: Count the items formally killed each quarter. If that number is zero, the team is deferring rather than deciding, and the backlog is doing the saying-no for them.

6. We ask before we assume

Behavior it drives: Clarifying questions precede building. The awkward "what problem is this actually solving?" gets asked in week one, not week six.

How you would know it is working: Rework rate. Track how much shipped work gets scrapped because it solved the wrong problem.

7. We cover for each other without keeping score

Behavior it drives: People pick up work outside their role during crunch, and nobody logs the favor for later.

How you would know it is working: Recognition that crosses function lines. When appreciation only flows within teams, the value has already narrowed to tribes.

8. We protect two hours a day for deep work

Behavior it drives: Blocked calendars, async status updates, meetings that need a written reason to exist.

How you would know it is working: Meeting hours per person per week. This number should stay flat as headcount grows. It almost never does, which is exactly why the value earns its place.

9. We hire slower than we want to

Behavior it drives: A seat stays open rather than getting filled with a near-miss candidate.

How you would know it is working: Percentage of hires still present and performing at 12 months. Fast hiring shows up as slow attrition data nine months later.

Work values examples for scaling companies, 50 to 250 employees

This is where the first layer of managers appears and information stops moving by proximity. Gallup found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement across business units (Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015). At this stage, values either get transmitted through managers or they do not get transmitted at all.

10. We disagree in the meeting, not after it

Behavior it drives: Objections surface live. Hallway relitigating stops being an option. Amazon codifies this as "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit," where leaders are obligated to challenge decisions respectfully even when it is uncomfortable (Amazon Leadership Principles).

How you would know it is working: Ask one pulse question after significant meetings: did anyone hold back an opinion? A rising "yes" rate is your early warning.

11. We give feedback within a week of the thing happening

Behavior it drives: Observations get delivered while the context is still shared, instead of stockpiled for a review cycle.

How you would know it is working: Median days between an event and the feedback about it. Anything past 30 days is archaeology, not coaching.

12. We explain the why before we assign the what

Behavior it drives: Managers lead with context. Tasks arrive attached to the priority they serve.

How you would know it is working: Ask people to name the company's top three priorities in their own words. If the answers diverge, context is not travelling with the work.

13. We make our work visible to people who do not sit near us

Behavior it drives: Written updates and shared dashboards replace the ambient awareness that used to come free with a small office.

How you would know it is working: Count cross-team dependencies discovered late. That number should fall each quarter even as team count rises.

14. We recognize the people who made it possible, not just the person who presented it

Behavior it drives: Recognition names the full chain of contribution, including the unglamorous middle.

How you would know it is working: Look at distribution, not volume. If 20% of people receive 80% of recognition, the value is decorative. Happily.ai's hotspot map exists for exactly this, showing which teams are recognition deserts before their engagement scores confirm it. Our guide to values-based recognition programs covers how to tie appreciation to a named value.

15. We promote managers who grow people, not the strongest individual contributor

Behavior it drives: Separate IC and management tracks. Promotion criteria include what happened to the team, not only what happened to the number.

How you would know it is working: Engagement variance between teams should narrow over time. Manager scorecards make that variance visible per manager rather than averaged into invisibility.

16. We finish things before we start things

Behavior it drives: Work-in-progress limits. New initiatives wait for capacity instead of borrowing it.

How you would know it is working: Projects in flight per team, and cycle time from start to done. Both should shrink.

17. We say what we are not doing this quarter

Behavior it drives: Every roadmap ships with a published stop-list.

How you would know it is working: Does every team have one in writing, and do people cite it when declining requests? A stop-list nobody quotes is a document, not a value.

Workplace values examples for established organizations, 250+ employees

Past a few hundred people, culture stops being one thing. Sub-cultures form around managers, and the gap between written policy and daily practice becomes the whole game. MIT Sloan's analysis of 1.4 million employee reviews found that leaders living the core values ranks third among all predictors of how employees rate a culture, behind only feeling respected and having supportive leaders (Sull & Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2021).

18. We treat the policy as the floor, not the ceiling

Behavior it drives: Managers exercise judgement above the written minimum instead of hiding behind it.

How you would know it is working: Ratio of exceptions handled locally versus escalated. Heavy escalation means people are protecting themselves, not deciding.

19. We audit ourselves before anyone asks us to

Behavior it drives: Proactive reviews of pay bands, promotion rates, and incident patterns, run on a calendar rather than in response to a complaint.

How you would know it is working: Number of self-initiated audits per year and, more importantly, what changed as a result of each one.

20. We escalate risk without punishing the messenger

Behavior it drives: Near-misses get reported. The person who flags a problem they partly caused is treated as an asset.

How you would know it is working: Near-miss reports should go up as safety improves. A falling number usually means people stopped talking, not that risk stopped happening.

21. We keep decision rights close to the information

Behavior it drives: Every significant decision has one named owner, and that owner sits near the facts rather than near the top.

How you would know it is working: Count approval layers on a typical decision. Track it annually. Layers accumulate silently.

22. We retire rituals that have stopped working

Behavior it drives: Recurring meetings, reports, and ceremonies get sunset dates. Something has to be killed before something new is added.

How you would know it is working: Recurring meetings eliminated per year. If the answer is none, your calendar is now the org chart.

23. We onboard people to the culture, not only the tools

Behavior it drives: New hires receive real stories of values applied to hard calls, including the ones the company got wrong.

How you would know it is working: A 90-day pulse asking new hires to give one concrete example of a value in action. Vague answers mean onboarding covered systems and skipped the culture.

24. We hold senior people to the values harder than junior people

Behavior it drives: Values breaches carry heavier consequences the more authority someone has.

How you would know it is working: Has anyone senior ever been exited for a values reason? One documented case does more to establish a value than a decade of all-hands slides.

25. We tell people where they stand before they have to ask

Behavior it drives: Performance signal arrives continuously, so nobody is surprised at review time.

How you would know it is working: Percentage of employees who correctly predict their own rating. Under 70% means your feedback is not landing, whatever the process document says.

Establishing core values: how to actually run the process

Most values exercises fail in the first hour, when a leadership team opens a blank document and starts brainstorming adjectives. That method produces the same four words everyone else produced. In the MIT Sloan study, integrity appeared in 65% of company values statements, collaboration in 53%, customer focus in 48%, and respect in 35%. No other value appeared in more than a third (Sull, Turconi & Sull, 2020).

Here is a process that produces values specific enough to be wrong.

1. Start with evidence, not a whiteboard. Pull what your organization already tells you: exit interview themes, feedback tags, recognition patterns, the questions that come up in every skip-level. You are documenting behavior that already exists, not inventing behavior you admire.

2. Name the behavior first, the label second. Write "we tell people the bad news first" before you consider calling it Transparency. Labels are compression. If you compress before you have the behavior, you compress an assumption.

3. Write every statement as "We." Not "I am transparent." Not "Be transparent." People assess a collective more honestly than they assess themselves, and a "We" statement can be tested by asking the team whether it is currently true.

4. Test each candidate against a decision you regret. Take a real call from the past 18 months that went badly. Would this value have changed it? If not, the value is describing weather rather than steering.

5. Cut to the number your stage can carry. Fewer than three is not a system. More than seven is a reading assignment. Most companies land at four or five.

6. Wire them into three systems within 30 days. Hiring criteria, recognition, and promotion. A value absent from all three is decoration. Tools like MyCulture.ai assess values alignment during hiring, and a recognition currency such as Happily.ai's gems lets people tag appreciation to a specific value, so you can see which ones are actually being practiced and which have never been cited once.

7. Set the review date before you launch. Put it in the calendar now. Values without a scheduled re-examination drift into folklore.

Core values by company stage: a comparison

Choose the lower end of each range if your teams are distributed across time zones. Every additional value costs recall, and recall is what makes a value usable in the moment a decision gets made.

Honest tradeoffs: aspirational values, descriptive values, and why copying fails

Patrick Lencioni made the useful distinction in Harvard Business Review two decades ago, separating core values from aspirational, permission-to-play, and accidental ones (Lencioni, "Make Your Values Mean Something," HBR, July 2002). The practical version of that split is simpler.

Descriptive values name behavior your best people already exhibit. They are easy to verify, easy to hire against, and they inspire nobody. Their job is consistency.

Aspirational values name behavior you do not yet have. They are motivating and genuinely useful during a transformation. They are also the ones that create cynicism, because employees can tell the difference between a goal and a claim.

The tradeoff is real and you cannot avoid it. Run entirely descriptive and your values will not pull the company anywhere new. Run entirely aspirational and your values become a running joke by the second quarter. Most working sets combine three or four descriptive values with one aspirational one, and the aspirational one is labeled as such out loud.

Why copying another company's values fails

Atlassian publishes "Open company, no bullshit" and "Don't #@!% the customer" (Atlassian company values). Amazon publishes "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit." These work at those companies because each is enforced by machinery most organizations do not have. Amazon's principle is wired into hiring loops and promotion documents. Adopting the sentence without the machinery gets you the sentence.

There is a second problem. A borrowed value describes the company you took it from. Atlassian's phrasing survives because it matches how Atlassian already argues. Copied into an organization where blunt disagreement gets punished, it becomes evidence that leadership does not know what happens on the floor. That is the gap the MIT Sloan data captured across 562 companies: published values and lived values were uncorrelated.

The honest tradeoff on values work generally: defining them takes a two-day offsite, and embedding them takes a permanent operating change. Only about one in four U.S. employees strongly agree they can apply their organization's values to their daily work, and only two in 10 employees feel strongly connected to their organization's culture at all (Gallup, August 2023). Companies that stop at definition see no measurable movement. Companies that pair definition with daily reinforcement see the compounding. Gallup found that a 10% improvement in employees' connection to organizational mission is associated with an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% increase in profitability.

From values to daily behavior

Values fail in the gap between the annual survey and the daily decision. That gap is what separates Culture Activation from culture measurement. A survey tells you what people thought last quarter. Activation puts the value in front of people the day they need it.

In practice that means three mechanics running continuously:

• Values-tagged recognition. When appreciation is attached to a named value, you get behavioral data instead of sentiment data. Which values get cited weekly? Which have never been cited? Happily.ai's gems, a redeemable recognition currency, make that visible per team.
• Behavioral engagement measurement. DEBI, the Dynamic Engagement Behavior Index, scores team engagement 0 to 100 from what people actually do rather than from what they report once a year. Next to a traditional annual engagement survey, the difference is a scale you step on daily versus one you visit each December.
• Manager-level visibility. Since managers drive most of the engagement variance, values adoption has to be readable per manager. Manager scorecards and the hotspot map surface teams where stated values and lived values have separated, while the gap is still small enough to close.

Culture tools average 25% adoption across the industry, which means three of four become shelfware and measure nothing at all. Happily.ai reaches 97% adoption, and organizations running it daily report a 9x trust multiplier from peer recognition and roughly 40% lower turnover, worth around $480K a year for a mid-sized team.

For the sequencing of what happens after the offsite, read you've designed your core values, now what. For the distinction between the values you write and the culture you actually get, see the difference between culture and values.

Frequently asked questions

How many core values should a company have?

Three to six, depending on size. Under 50 people, three or four is enough because proximity does most of the transmission work. At 250 or more, five or six is defensible because you need coverage across more situations. Past six, recall collapses, and a value nobody can recall in the moment cannot influence a decision. The number matters less than the specificity: four behavioral statements beat eight abstract nouns every time.

What are examples of good work values?

Good work values name observable behavior and are written collectively. "We tell people the bad news first," "We disagree in the meeting, not after it," and "We finish things before we start things" all qualify, because someone could watch a week of your team and tell you whether each is true. Weak work values are single abstract nouns like excellence, integrity, or passion. Gallup reports that only about one in four U.S. employees strongly agree they can apply their organization's values to daily work, and vagueness is the main reason.

How do you establish core values for a company?

Start with evidence rather than brainstorming. Pull themes from exit interviews, recognition patterns, and repeated skip-level questions to document behavior that already exists in your best teams. Write each candidate as a "We" statement describing a behavior, test it against a real decision you regret, cut to the number your stage can carry, then wire the surviving values into hiring, recognition, and promotion within 30 days. Set the review date before launch.

How do you know if your core values are working?

Every value needs a signal you can check without waiting for a survey. Recognition distribution shows whether appreciation reaches beyond the visible 20%. Time from problem to escalation shows whether transparency is real. Engagement variance between teams shows whether managers are transmitting values or absorbing them. A pulse survey asking whether people can name a decision a value changed in the last month gives you the cleanest read available.

Can you use another company's core values?

You can borrow the phrasing, but you cannot borrow the enforcement. Values like Amazon's "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit" function because they are embedded in hiring loops and promotion criteria. Lifted into an organization without that machinery, a borrowed value describes a company you are not, and employees notice the mismatch immediately. Use other companies' values as evidence that specific, behavioral phrasing works. Then write your own behaviors.

Start here

Pick one value you already claim. Write the behavior it should produce as a "We" statement. Then find the number that would tell you whether it is happening. If you cannot find that number, you do not have a value yet. You have a word.

Want to see which of your values are actually being practiced this week? Book a demo to see how Happily.ai makes values adoption visible per team.

Sources:

• When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk? - Donald Sull, Stefano Turconi, Charles Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review (July 2020)
• 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right - Donald Sull, Charles Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review (September 2021)
• Diagnosing a Broken Culture, and What to Do About It - Gallup (August 2023)
• Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement - Gallup, State of the American Manager (2015)
• Make Your Values Mean Something - Patrick M. Lencioni, Harvard Business Review (July 2002)
• Amazon Leadership Principles - Amazon
• Atlassian Company Values - Atlassian

Internal Links Used:

• Values-Based Recognition Programs
• You've Designed Your Core Values, Now What
• The Difference Between Culture and Values
• Manager Development
• Pulse Survey
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