Culture and Values Development
A culture and values programme is the process of defining what your business stands for, then embedding those values into leadership behaviour, hiring, appraisals and day to day decisions, so they’re lived rather than just written down. Done well, it covers four stages: defining core values, aligning leadership, building them into HR systems, and reinforcing them through ongoing communication.
Culture is the character of your business. It’s what makes your workplace feel the way it does, why some teams pull together under pressure while others fall apart, and why some businesses attract great people while others struggle to keep anyone for long. A clear culture and values strategy turns that character into something you can actually shape, rather than something that just happens to you.
Your company values give employees a sense of connection and clarity. They act as your internal brand, the thing people point to when they explain why they chose to work here, and why they stay. Get this right and you’ll see it show up in engagement, in retention, and in how your team behaves when nobody senior is watching.
Why Culture and Values Matter for Growing Businesses
For a small or growing business, culture is rarely written down anywhere. It exists in how the founder behaves, how decisions get made, and what gets rewarded. That works fine at ten people. It starts to break down at thirty, and it can unravel completely once you’re managing multiple sites or a franchise network.
A defined culture and values strategy helps you:
Attract people who genuinely fit your business, not just people who’ll take any job
Reduce the cost and disruption of high staff turnover
Give managers a framework for decisions, rather than leaving it to guesswork
Build a workforce that’s more engaged, more productive and more likely to advocate for you with customers
Our Culture and Values Development Process
We work with your leadership team and your wider workforce, not just one or the other, because culture only sticks when both groups are genuinely involved.
- Identify and embed shared values. We run consultancy sessions with senior leaders and workshops with employees to surface what your business actually values, rather than what sounds good on a website.
- Engage with staff and people who need support. Employee engagement workshops and surveys tell us where culture is working and where it’s slipping.
- Tap into discretionary effort. We help you understand what motivates your team to go beyond the basics of their job.
- Build local networks and community links. Culture doesn’t stop at your office door; we help you connect it to the wider community your business operates in.
- Encourage shared responsibility. We help embed values into how teams hold each other accountable, not just how management does.
Invest in training, learning and development. Values need reinforcing. We build this into onboarding and ongoing development.
"An organisations culture is the product of its values, expectations and environment.”
What’s Included
- Employee engagement workshops, surveys and diagnostics
- Consultancy sessions with senior leaders and the Board
- Employee data reviews and implementation plans
- Tools and guidance for changing behaviour within a team
- Recruitment and attraction support, so new hires fit your values from day one
- Values-led onboarding frameworks for new starters
Reward and recognition sit close to culture too. If you want to explore how recognition reinforces the behaviours you want to see, our guide to strategic reward management is a good next read.
Who This Service Is For
Whether you’re running a small business defining values for the first time, a corporate business managing culture across departments, a healthcare organisation balancing patient care with staff wellbeing, or a franchise trying to keep culture consistent across sites, we tailor the approach to your size and sector.
Culture and values work closely alongside Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Employee Relations, and Leadership and Management Training, all of which help turn stated values into everyday behaviour.
Get Started
For more information on how we can help your organisation with culture and values development, contact us here, or start with a Free HR Health Check to see where your culture currently stands.
Common FAQs
It’s the process of defining what your business stands for and turning that into everyday behaviour, from how people are led to how decisions get made.
A clear, lived culture helps you attract the right people, keep them longer, and avoid the cost of high staff turnover, something small and growing teams feel more acutely than larger ones.
This depends on business size and starting point, but most engagements run from a few weeks for a focused values workshop through to several months for a full culture change programme.
Yes. We run leadership and employee workshops to identify what genuinely matters to your business, rather than handing you a generic list of values.
Yes, our workshops and surveys are designed to work for distributed teams as well as office-based ones.
A culture and values programme is the process of defining what your business stands for, then deliberately shaping behaviour, leadership and systems so those values show up in day to day working life, not just on a poster in the office. It typically involves four stages.
1. Defining your core values
This starts with identifying the small number of non-negotiable principles that matter most to your business, such as integrity, accountability or collaboration, then drafting them into clear, memorable language that staff can actually recall and apply, rather than generic corporate phrases.
2. Aligning leadership behaviour
Values only take hold when leaders visibly model them. This means managers making decisions that reflect the stated values, and being willing to address behaviour that contradicts them, even when that’s uncomfortable. A values programme that stops at a document and doesn’t reach leadership behaviour rarely survives past the first difficult quarter.
3. Embedding values into HR systems
For values to stick, they need to be built into how the business actually operates: recruitment questions that test for cultural fit, appraisal criteria that reward value-driven performance, and promotion decisions that reflect it too. Removing friction matters just as much, so processes like approvals and internal communication should support the culture rather than quietly undermine it.
4. Communicating and reinforcing the culture
Ongoing reinforcement keeps values alive: regular team sessions, recognition schemes that celebrate the right behaviours, and honest feedback loops so staff can tell you when the reality doesn’t match the message.
For a growing business or startup, a culture and values programme is usually most effective when it’s built early and revisited as the team scales, since the habits and expectations set in the first year tend to shape everything that follows. Centric HR works with businesses to define their values and build the practical HR structures, from recruitment to appraisals, that keep them embedded as the company grows.
