What are the Most Common Company Values Worldwide?

Walk into almost any company's lobby or scroll to the bottom of its careers page, and you'll find a short list of words trying to summarize its soul. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. It's tempting to read these as marketing wallpaper, and often they are. But the practice itself is older and more serious than the posters suggest.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras gave it real shape in their 1994 book Built to Last, when they showed that enduring companies weren't the ones with the cleverest strategy but the ones with a clear, stable sense of what they stood for. That idea stuck. Core values became less of a nice-to-have and more of an operating system: the thing that quietly shapes how decisions get made when nobody senior is in the room.

Done well, shared values do measurable work. They lift engagement, because people want to know what they're actually part of. They sharpen brand identity, because customers can tell the difference between a company that means what it says and one that doesn't. And they build trust with everyone watching from outside — investors, partners, the public — who are, whether companies like it or not, always watching.

When should a company actually define its values?

There's no perfect moment, no maturity milestone where a business suddenly becomes ready. But most companies that get this right start early, often in the scrappy first years when culture is still wet cement. Whatever gets set down now — the habits, the unspoken rules about how people treat each other — hardens fast, and it's much easier to shape while it's still soft.

Values act as a kind of blueprint for where the company is headed. A mission statement does something slightly different: it gives people a reason larger than the task in front of them, which matters more than most founders expect on the days the work gets hard. Neither of these should be treated as fixed. As a company grows, the market shifts, the team changes — it's worth returning to these statements and asking whether they still fit, or whether you're just reciting them out of habit.

The one thing worth holding onto through all of that: values were never meant to live on an "About Us" page. They're only real once they show up in how a manager handles a mistake, how a team debates a hard call, how someone gets treated on a bad day.

Do employees actually believe in the values on the wall?

Sometimes, and sometimes very much not. I've sat in enough rooms to see the exact moment a stated value loses the room — you can watch it happen on people's faces. It usually starts with a gap between what's printed and what's practiced. Once employees notice that gap, the value doesn't just become useless. It becomes a joke, or worse, a symbol of exactly the culture leadership claims not to have.

Take a company that names "integrity" as a value while its leaders quietly cut corners. Or one that celebrates "innovation" in its handbook while punishing anyone who takes a real risk. Neither hypocrisy needs to be dramatic to register — employees are unusually good at detecting small, repeated inconsistencies, and they draw conclusions from them whether or not anyone talks about it out loud.

Closing that gap takes more than better wording. Values need to be communicated clearly, yes, but they also need to be visible in leadership behavior and wired into the systems that actually run the place — how people are hired, reviewed, promoted, paid. When someone can trace a straight line from a stated value to a real consequence, the value stops being decoration and starts being true.

What happens when a company's actions contradict its values

It happens more than anyone would like to admit, and three cases are worth knowing simply because they're so instructive.

1. Wells Fargo: Employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets — a direct betrayal of the "trust" and "customer service" the bank claimed to stand for.
2. Enron: Accounting fraud brought the company down entirely, in flat contradiction of the "communication," "respect," and "integrity" it had written into its own culture.
3. Volkswagen: Engineers programmed diesel engines to cheat emissions tests, undermining the very idea of "responsibility" the company had built its reputation on.

None of these failed because the values were badly chosen. They failed because stating a value and living it are two entirely different disciplines, and only one of them protects a company's reputation. The cost of getting this wrong is never just financial — it's the slower, harder-to-reverse loss of the trust that took years to build.

The common threads across company values worldwide

Look across enough mission statements and value lists from companies on different continents, in different industries, and a pattern starts to surface. Underneath all the different wording, most of what companies claim to value clusters into four broad themes: integrity, goal-orientation, building a better world, and people-centric values.

Integrity

This is the theme that shows up almost everywhere, and for good reason — it's the foundation everything else rests on. At its core, integrity is a commitment to doing the right thing even when there's no audience for it.

Values commonly found in this category:

• Commitment — holding to the company's mission and goals even under pressure.
• Honesty — transparency in dealings, especially the uncomfortable ones.
• Respect — treating every stakeholder with dignity, not just the ones with leverage.
• Trust — built slowly, internally and externally, and lost quickly.
• Personal responsibility — owning your actions and their consequences.

Goal-orientation

Alongside integrity sits a very different instinct: the drive to achieve, grow, and keep pushing past the last result. This is the energy that gets things built, and most successful companies have a strong dose of it somewhere in their culture.

Values commonly found in this category:

• Accountability — owning outcomes, not just intentions.
• Challenge — treating improvement as a habit rather than an event.
• Determination — staying the course when the easy option would be to quit.
• Growth — investing in people and teams, not just quarterly numbers.
• Ownership — taking genuine pride in the work, not just credit for it.

Building a better world

There's a growing recognition, worldwide, that a company's footprint extends past its balance sheet. This theme captures the values that point outward — toward the environment, the community, the wider consequences of doing business at all.

Values commonly found in this category:

• Sustainability — weighing long-term environmental cost against short-term gain.
• Innovation — a willingness to change course when the old way stops serving people.
• Impact — measuring success partly by the difference made beyond the company itself.
• Social responsibility — acting with the wider community's interests in view.
• Ethical practice — holding operations to a standard beyond what's merely legal.

People-centric values

However automated or global a business becomes, it is still, underneath everything, made of people talking to each other. This theme covers the values that govern how those people work together — a quieter category, perhaps, but no less decisive for a company's culture.

Values commonly found in this category:

• Teamwork — collaborating toward something bigger than any one role.
• Communication — dialogue that's honest even when it's uncomfortable.
• Diversity — genuinely valuing different experiences and perspectives, not just counting them.
• Leadership — inspiring through example rather than authority alone.
• Inclusion — building an environment where people actually feel they belong.

How do companies find their real values, rather than borrow someone else's?

Values that are copied from a competitor's website rarely survive contact with reality. The companies that get this right tend to use some combination of the following:

1. Workshops and brainstorming — bringing together a genuine cross-section of the organization, not just the leadership team, and working through structured exercises to surface what the company actually stands for. A well-run values workshop can draw on tools like SWOT analysis or facilitated discussion, but the format matters less than the honesty in the room.
2. Surveys and interviews — asking employees and stakeholders directly what they believe the company values, either internally or with the help of an outside firm that specialises in organizational culture.
3. Consultants or specialists — an outside perspective can see patterns that are invisible from inside. If you go this route, look for a values training program that's research-based and has a track record of actually changing behavior, not just producing a poster.
4. Revisiting the mission and vision — these documents often already contain the seeds of the company's values, planted at founding and rarely reread since.
5. Watching the culture that already exists — how people make decisions, resolve disagreements, treat each other under pressure. The real values are usually already there, just unnamed.
6. Looking at the company's founding story — the original intent behind a company, and the conditions it was born into, often explain more about its values than any workshop will.
7. Listening to employee feedback — people on the ground frequently understand what the company actually values long before it's written down anywhere.
8. Studying the decisions that worked — looking back at genuinely successful initiatives and asking what values were quietly driving them.

Once a company has found its values, the real work is making them visible and unavoidable:

• Weaving them into mission and vision statements.
• Reinforcing them through internal communication and training.
• Demonstrating them, repeatedly, through leadership behavior.
• Building them into performance metrics and reward systems.
• Reflecting them honestly in marketing and external communication.
• Writing them into a code of conduct with real expectations attached.
• Using a tool like the Values App to turn stated values into daily habits.

Naming values is the easy part. The harder, more important work is making sure they show up in how the company actually operates — because a value that isn't operational is just a sentence.

Final thoughts

The specific wording will always differ from one company to the next, but the four themes — integrity, goal-orientation, building a better world, and people-centric values — turn up again and again, in companies of every size and on every continent. That consistency isn't a coincidence. It says something about what people, wherever they work, actually need from an organization to trust it.

Understanding these themes gives a company somewhere honest to start, rather than reaching for whatever sounds impressive on a wall — and if you're choosing yours now, the free Company Values Builder turns each candidate value into behaviors, hiring questions and rituals you can actually run. The real test was never whether the values were well chosen. It's whether anyone can tell, from watching how the place actually runs, that they're true.