How to Refresh Your Company Values: A Comprehensive Guide

Most values refreshes start in the wrong place. A leadership offsite, a marketing brief, a consultant's deck — and out comes a tidy list of words that sound impressive and land nowhere. (If you're at the choosing stage right now, the free Company Values Builder pairs every value with the behaviors, interview questions and rituals that make it usable.) If you want values that actually change behavior, start somewhere less glamorous: with what your people already, quietly, care about.

It's worth remembering what a company actually is. Strip away the org chart and the software stack, and you're left with a group of committed individuals trying to move toward something together. Values work only when it speaks to that group, not around it.

Why employee-centered values work better

Try to align people around pure extrinsic motivators — revenue targets, growth numbers, shareholder value — and you'll hit a ceiling fast, especially with people who have little control over those outcomes and no felt connection to the mission behind them. Money motivates, but it doesn't sustain. What sustains people is knowing their work connects to something they'd choose for themselves.

This is why finding out what your team genuinely values matters so much. Done well, it gives you clarity on what actually drives people day to day — not what an engagement survey assumes drives them. Most organizations reach for the same Band-Aids when engagement dips: a wellness webinar, a new perk, another all-hands about "culture." These interventions rarely move the needle, because they're built on generic survey data that never captures what's really going on beneath the surface for your specific people, in your specific team.

In my forthcoming book, Start With Values, I go deeper into this idea of co-creating values collectively rather than handing them down. Whether you're three people in a garage or a company entering its next chapter, the process below is a way to surface the values that are already alive in your group, rather than inventing new ones.

Start by helping people discover their own values

Before you can understand a team's shared values, individuals need a way to get clear on their own. This sounds obvious, but most people have never actually done it — they've absorbed values from family, culture, and workplace osmosis without ever examining which ones are truly theirs. Tools like the Values App, which we built at Start With Values, make this quick: a few focused minutes is often enough to shift how someone sees their own priorities. There's a growing body of psychology research — some of it using tools like the Value Clarity Questionnaire — suggesting that people with clearer personal values tend to report modestly better well-being over time, though the effects are small and most of that work looks at individuals rather than teams at work. People leave clearer not just on what matters to them, but on where their daily choices are quietly out of step with it.

Simon Sinek, author of "Start with Why," put it plainly: "Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first." Give people a genuine tool for self-understanding, and you're not just doing a culture exercise — you're helping them build a more coherent, purposeful life, one they happen to be living partly at work.

Look for the pattern across the group

Individual clarity is the foundation, but the real signal shows up when you look at the group as a whole. What do people share in common, once you strip away the individual variation?

In one anonymized engagement we consulted on, the leadership team expected ambition and achievement to top the list. Instead, harmony and flexibility came out on top — and it surprised them enough to make them stop and reconsider. Rather than ignoring the data because it didn't match their assumptions, they acted on it: flexible working arrangements and a real investment in leadership empathy. In an informal follow-up survey, the team reported better dynamics and satisfaction — a result that was never independently verified, but it lined up with what you'd expect when an intervention matches what people actually value rather than what leadership guessed they valued.

Read burnout and stress as data, not just symptoms

When you see chronic burnout, stress, fatigue, or anxiety across a team, it's tempting to treat it purely as a workload problem. Often it's something more specific: a value being violated, repeatedly, without anyone naming it. Relentless pressure and overload, for instance, is frequently a direct violation of a well-being value — and the fatigue that follows is the nervous system's honest report on that mismatch. Once you know which values are in play, you can address the actual cause instead of managing the symptom.

It's the same idea Simon Sinek was getting at when he said leadership isn't about being in charge — it's about taking care of those in your charge. Knowing your people's values is how you take care of them in a way that's specific rather than generic.

Decide what belongs in your official values statement

Once you've gathered the group-level picture, you face a choice: do some of these shared values earn a place in your formal company values statement? Simply giving people a self-discovery tool is already a meaningful well-being intervention on its own. But folding the results into your official statement takes it further — it signals, unmistakably, that these values weren't handed down from above. They were built together. That distinction is what tends to produce real buy-in instead of polite nodding.

Use the Values Pyramid to check for balance

When you're deciding which values to formalize, the Values Pyramid is a useful way to check you're not over-indexing on one level of human need:

1. Survival values — the foundation that matters most under real pressure or threat.
2. Belonging values — the sense of being seen, valued, and part of something shared.
3. Growth values — curiosity, learning, and the discipline of practice.
4. Impact values — status, recognition, and visible achievement.
5. Fulfillment values — legacy, service, and the pursuit of something larger than yourself.

Aim for at least one value from belonging, growth, impact, and fulfillment, and cap the total list at five. Beyond that, people stop remembering them — and a value nobody remembers isn't really a value, it's decoration.

Make the values behavioral, not aspirational

Once you've settled on your values, resist the urge to just print them on a poster. Build a campaign that connects each value to specific, observable behaviors. A value without a matching behavior is just a nice idea people nod along to and then forget by Tuesday. Pair values with behaviors, though, and they become practical — they speed up decisions, clarify autonomy, and build the kind of trust that doesn't need to be micromanaged.

Give your values a hierarchy and wire them into how work actually happens

Not all values carry equal weight in every decision, so it helps to establish some priority among them. Then link that hierarchy to the systems that actually run your organization — performance reviews, onboarding, how promotions get decided. This is the difference between values that are stated and values that are lived. Skip this step, and your refresh will quietly decay back into the same disconnect you started with.

Keep measuring, and be willing to adjust

Treat the refreshed values as a hypothesis, not a finished product. Regular feedback loops, honest employee surveys, and performance metrics will tell you whether the new values are actually shaping behavior or just sitting in a document somewhere. When the data says something isn't landing, adjust it. Values that can't evolve with the organization tend to calcify into the same empty slogans you were trying to replace.

Leadership has to go first

Values only take root in an organization when leaders visibly live them, especially when it costs something. If care is one of your values, leadership needs to treat it as seriously as they treat the quarterly numbers — not as a nice sentiment that gets shelved the moment a hard tradeoff appears. People notice the gap between what's said and what's rewarded faster than any survey will tell you.

Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, captured this well: "Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to." When how you train and treat people actually matches your stated values, you build a workforce that's loyal for real reasons, not out of inertia.

What this looks like in practice

Google offers a useful case in point: its long-standing principle, "Focus on the user and all else will follow," isn't a wall decoration — it's a working filter that has genuinely shaped product decisions and innovation over time. The value earns its place because it's used, repeatedly, in real trade-offs.

More broadly, this lines up with what organizational psychologists find when they study the gap between "espoused" and "enacted" values — whether what a company says it values matches what it actually does. When the two are consistent, the research links it to higher engagement, commitment, and job satisfaction, even if most of those studies track effects over months rather than proving it holds up for years.

Start with your people, and let the culture follow

Refreshing your values by actually involving your employees — rather than handing them a finished statement — changes the texture of an organization. It builds engagement and a working sense of purpose, because people recognize themselves in the result. Understand what genuinely matters to your team, fold it honestly into how you operate, and you end up with something more resilient than a values poster: a workforce that's actually pulling in the same direction.

Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos, said it simply: "Your culture is your brand." A values-based culture, built from the inside, doesn't just strengthen how your organization runs day to day — it shapes how the outside world experiences you, too. Start with your people's values. Let the rest of the organization follow from there.