Building resilient company cultures through values in action

It’s one thing for a company to claim it has a great culture and talk about it all the time. It’s entirely another for that company to back it up through decisive action.

At Ragan’s Employee Communication and Culture Conference earlier this year, Shira Good, associate vice president chancellor for communications and issues management at the University of Denver, told the audience that statements of culture are all well and good, but they’re empty and won’t build culture if the company doesn’t model them.

“It’s great to have these things in a three-ring binder,” she said. “That’s on someone’s shelf. It’s great to have them on a wall — they look really pretty. But if employees aren’t knowing what they are and aren’t applying it to their day-to-day work, they don’t matter.”

Good shared an anecdote about an exercise her team undertook that involved asking people around the University of Denver’s campus about the school’s values.

“We did this really cool thing where we stopped people throughout campus and asked them if they could name our mission, vision or values,” she said. “Very few could. Especially employees. They’re head down in the grind of their day-to-day tasks.”