Your vision and values can be clearly stated on signs throughout your office, but in the end, it’s still more about what your employees think it is than what you say it is.
It’s a lesson that Michael Evans has taken to heart at the American Institute of Toxicology Inc., a forensic testing and research company that does business as AIT Laboratories.
As the founder, president and CEO, Evans says his job is to identify the vision and values for the company, and then communicate them to the company’s 325 employees with consistency and passion.
“My real job is keeper of the culture,” Evans says. “I maintain the culture, I maintain the standards by which we operate, the values, and make sure that we constantly drive those values as we make our decisions going forward. If it’s not consistent with our values, we’re not going to do it.”
Smart Business spoke with Evans about how you can build, maintain and communicate your vision and values at your company.
Know what you stand for. Establishing your vision and values comes down to knowing what you are really about, who are you, and do you stand for anything. You need to establish that early on. That message has to resonate throughout the company, and the hardest job I’m faced with is to make sure that message gets down to every employee as we continue to grow.
When we first started the company, it was me and a few other people. It’s pretty easy to communicate values at that point. But as we grew, the question became how to continually do that. It’s showing it every day, even in little ways. It’s just saying thank you to people when they do a good job, showing recognition to people when they do a good job, showing your appreciation to them, showing them that they’re valued members of the company.
As an example of how we convey our values, we donate 5 percent of our net profits to charity. We do that because it’s part of our values system. We engage our employees in doing that, we have a contributions committee that decides where the money is going to go. We demonstrate through our actions what we’re about as a company, what values we stand for.