Millennials and Gen Z employees report a gap between desired and lived organizational values.

Values are most effective when they guide relationships, performance, and positive change.

Leading companies embed values through stewardship, communication, rewards, and accountability.

Leaders reinforce values by modeling them consistently and integrating them into daily decisions.

Co-authored by Peter G. Dominick, Dimitra Iordanoglou, and Gregory Prastacos

Strong organizational values can be powerful tools for driving organizations’ success and are also crucial in attracting, retaining, and motivating talent. However, many organizations describe their core values, yet fall short in effectively integrating them into their daily operations.

Three of us (Peter G. Dominick, Dimitra Iordanoglou, and Gregory Prastacos) recently conducted a survey that sheds further light on this. It included almost 1100 Millennials and Generation Z employees from diverse backgrounds, covering a variety of industries. This demographic represents around 45% of the U.S. and global workforces, and is only growing. We found that they desired organizational values that the “Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For” embrace, namely values guiding relationships, desired performance, and positive change. However, our results suggested that these same employees felt their companies were not sufficiently guided by these desired values.

The findings are alarming. They indicate that even though most companies report espouse values that employees desire, many fail to demonstrate, communicate and support them effectively. Such gaps can have detrimental effects on employees’ commitment and performance, and may partially explain the low engagement levels (e.g. “quiet quitting”) and low retention rates among Millennials and Generation Z employees.

So, how can organizations better implement their espoused values? Building on that earlier research, published in the Journal of Business Ethics, which examined the espoused values of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For and the practices they use to embed those values into organizational life, we collected, through in-depth interviews, insights from senior managers at nine companies........

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