10 November 2026 · 14 min read

Company values examples you could catch someone doing

What are company values, and why don't they show up at work?

Dami is in her third week. Every morning she climbs past the same word, painted a metre high on the stairwell wall: Courage.

On Thursday, in planning, Joel starts to say that the launch date will not hold. Two sentences in, the head of the team talks over him, the meeting moves on, and Joel looks at his notes for the next forty minutes. Nobody says anything. Dami does not either. She is three weeks in, and she has just learned more about courage at this company than the stairwell will ever tell her.

Dami and Joel are invented. The Thursday is not rare.

Company values are the few qualities a company says should guide how its people work and decide: what it holds, written down so that everyone can hold it too. They earn the name only when they show up in ordinary choices, such as who gets heard, what gets owned and which corner does not get cut. Until then they are a list.

31% of UK office workers in a United Culture survey say their company's stated values show in practice (United Culture, via HRreview, 14 October 2025). When your values show up differently on every team goes into that gap. This piece starts at the other end: what a value looks like on the day somebody actually lives it.

Does picking the right company values make a better culture?

Most lists of core values examples assume the hard part is choosing the words. One study suggests the words are the least of it. Across 562 companies that published their values, there was no correlation between the values they emphasised and how their employees rated the culture (Sull, Turconi and Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review, 21 July 2020).

That is a correlation on published values. It does not say values do not matter. It says that which words a company chose told you nothing about how its people rated the place. My reading: the word is the label on a box, and employees were rating what they found inside it.

So the list below is not a list of words to pick. It is what each word looks like when somebody can be caught doing it, which is the only version of a value anybody can rate.

Company values examples: eight core values you could catch someone doing

Each value comes in three parts. On the wall is what gets printed. What you would see is a moment in a room, a thing somebody does that you could point at. The Tuesday question is one line a manager could ask in an ordinary week to find out whether that moment is happening. The people are invented, first names only, and so are their companies.

Accountability

• On the wall: "We take ownership."
• What you would see: In the review of a missed deadline, Priya says "that one was mine, I saw the supplier's email on Monday and sat on it", before anyone has asked.
• The Tuesday question: "What did you own this week that you could have passed on?"

The real test is the meeting after Priya's. If owning a miss is what gets her remembered at review time, the next person will wait to be asked. That is how a blame culture starts, and it never announces itself.

Courage

• On the wall: "Have the courage to speak up."
• What you would see: Joel is talked over in planning, and someone more junior than the person talking says "hang on, Joel hadn't finished", and the room waits.
• The Tuesday question: "What did someone tell you this week that would have been easier to keep to themselves?"

Courage is the one value whose example always has a price on it, because the easy thing was available. Whether anybody pays it depends on what happened to the last person who did, which is what psychological safety is about.

Customer Focus

• On the wall: "The customer is at the heart of everything we do."
• What you would see: Kwame forwards a complaint to the product team in the customer's own words, rude bits included, instead of his tidy summary, and next week's work changes order because of it.
• The Tuesday question: "When did a customer change what we did this week, not just how we described it?"

The tidy summary is where Customer Focus quietly goes missing. Each retelling sands off the part that would have been inconvenient to act on.

Innovation

• On the wall: "We dare to think differently."
• What you would see: Leon brings a rough idea for handling new client requests to Monday's meeting and says "this is probably wrong". The first response is a question about how it would work, not a list of reasons it won't.
• The Tuesday question: "What did we try this month that might not work?"

If Innovation is only ever praised when it succeeds, it is a value about success. The example worth catching is the attempt, and what the room did with it.

Integrity

• On the wall: "We act with integrity."
• What you would see: Hana finds that a figure the board liked in her own report counted some sales twice, and says so at the next meeting. Nobody would have checked.
• The Tuesday question: "What did someone here say they would do last week, and did it happen?"

Integrity covers the small promise as much as the big correction. "I'll send it by Friday" is where most people meet it, every week.

Respect

• On the wall: "We treat everyone with respect."
• What you would see: A director answers a graduate's question in the team channel as quickly, and as fully, as she answers the chief executive's.
• The Tuesday question: "Whose message did you leave longest this week, and why theirs?"

Most people picture respect as politeness. The example worth catching is whose time gets treated as cheap, and an inbox shows that more honestly than any meeting.

Teamwork

• On the wall: "One team."
• What you would see: Ollie hits his own target on Wednesday and spends Thursday helping Sade clear hers. Nobody asked him to.
• The Tuesday question: "Who helped you this week with something that was not their job?"

Then check what Ollie's Thursday cost him. If the scorecard counts only his own numbers, Teamwork is a value he paid for and the company did not.

Trust

• On the wall: "We trust our people."
• What you would see: Ama's manager signs off her plan without asking for the spreadsheet behind it. When part of it goes wrong, he asks what she would change, and does not take the next one back.
• The Tuesday question: "What did you leave someone to decide this week without checking it afterwards?"

The opposite of Trust in practice is rarely a refusal. It is the quiet re-check: the decision handed over on Monday and remade on Wednesday.

Notice what the eight have in common. Each "what you would see" could happen in a meeting next week, and each could fail to happen without anybody saying so. A value you could catch someone doing is also one you could catch someone not doing, and that is the whole point of writing it this way.

How to tell whether a company value is real

A value is real when it changes what happens to people. Three tests, and none of them needs a consultant.

What gets rewarded, and what gets punished

Look at the last three people who were promoted or praised in public, and ask what exactly they were praised for. Then look at the last time somebody was quietly marked down. If the answers name your values, the values are real. If they name the number and the hours, those are your values, whatever the stairwell says.

Louise Thompson makes the same test from the other side in "Five signs of a Traitors culture" (HRZone, 28 October 2026): where people learn that closeness to the decision-makers counts for more than the work, they adjust their effort to match, and a question becomes the thing that gets you banished.

Has it ever cost anyone anything?

A value that has never cost the company a sale, a deadline or a comfortable afternoon has not been tested yet. Integrity becomes real at the moment it loses something: the deal not signed, the figure corrected in front of the board. Until then it is a prediction.

Does what is written match what happens?

The oldest evidence here is about ethics programmes, not values posters, but the shape carries across. A survey of employees at six large American companies found that a values-based cultural approach to ethics and compliance management worked best, and that what hurt effectiveness most was a programme employees believed existed only to protect top management from blame, or a culture of unquestioning obedience to authority (Treviño, Weaver, Gibson and Toffler, California Management Review, 1999). The paper's abstract lists consistency between policies and actions among the things that mattered.

It is one survey, from 1999, at six firms in one country: a direction, not a rule. My reading is narrow. People can tell when words exist to protect somebody rather than to guide everybody, and a value the senior team is exempt from reads as exactly that.

Which company values to drop first

Drop the ones nobody can be caught doing. A long list often turns out to be a few values and a few hopes, and the hopes water down the rest. Three tests, quick enough to run on your own list this afternoon:

• Can a new starter name it after a week? Not recite it from the induction slides, but name it because they have seen it. If Dami can name Courage only from the stairwell, it is decoration.
• Can you picture it in a room? Try to write its "what you would see" line. If all you can write is another abstract noun ("excellence means striving to be excellent"), the value has no behaviour in it yet.
• Could someone break it and have it noticed? If a person could ignore the value for a month and nobody would say so, it is not steering anyone.

A value that fails all three may still be worth keeping as an aim, if you say so: "this one we are working towards, and here is what we would see." The harm is in printing an aim as if it were already true, because everyone in the building can check.

How to embed company values in an ordinary week

Small and often beats once a year, and there is a reason to doubt the annual version. In a review of 839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments in 184 articles, the study gap that gave the best retention grew as the time the material had to be remembered grew (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer, Psychological Bulletin, 2006). Those were tests of remembering words, not of teams or values, so they prove nothing about culture. They are a fair reason to doubt that one all-hands a year keeps anything in mind until the next.

Ask one Tuesday question a week

Pick one value and its question, and open the team meeting with it. It takes two minutes. The answers are your examples, and a thin week is information too.

Name the behaviour when you see it

When you catch someone living a value, say what they did rather than which value they embodied. "Priya told us the deadline was hers before anyone asked" teaches more than "great accountability, Priya", because the next person can copy the first and not the second.

Put the value into the decision

When a choice is close, ask out loud which value it tests. That is the moment a value either costs something or does not, and the team sees which.

Company culture examples at team level

The same idea works one level down. A team's culture is its own set of things you could catch someone doing, and the place to write them is a team charter. A line such as "nobody is talked over: whoever was interrupted finishes first" is a company culture example you can watch for on Thursday. Joel's planning meeting would have gone differently with that line in it, and with someone willing to read it out.

How MeaningFuel helps with company values

The daily insight

A company chooses the values it holds and the skills it encourages, and each working day everyone gets one short insight on one of them. All eight above are values a company can choose: Accountability, Courage, Customer Focus, Innovation, Integrity, Respect, Teamwork and Trust. In an ordinary week a reader might meet an insight on Accountability on a Tuesday that asks them to notice the moment when passing something on would have been easier than owning it, and one on Courage on Thursday about the sentence they nearly did not say.

It will not catch anybody doing anything. What it does is put the value in front of people on a working day, in words that are not the poster's, for as long as the company keeps it running. A problem cannot be chosen for the daily culture: that is what a module is for.

The module: One Shared Culture

When the trouble is that a value means one thing in one team and something else next door, the module is One Shared Culture. Booked for a team, it invites the people on it, and those who join get one short lesson each working day for two weeks. Its first lesson asks each person to say what the company is for in a rough sentence of their own, in words they would use with a friend, rather than the official wording. Near the end they say it again and check one real decision against it, because, as the module puts it, "Purpose that never touches a decision looks good and changes nothing." The rest of the module is in When your values show up differently on every team.

What leaders read

Insights shows how much of each team takes part and how the insights land, by team and by value, and what people ask for more or less of, pooled, with nobody named. That is a reading of attention, not behaviour. It cannot tell you whether Joel finished his sentence on Thursday, and it does not try to. A team can take part every morning and still talk over its quietest member. The Tuesday question is how you find that out.

What it does not do

It does not choose your values, write the "what you would see" lines or check anyone against them, and it promises no result. Whether a value is real is still settled in the room.

Questions about company values

How many values should a company have?

Few enough that a new starter can list them from memory after a week, and say what each looks like. That is a rule of thumb, not a finding: no study we have read sets a number. If you need a card to remember them, so does everyone who works for you, and a value nobody can recall cannot guide a decision made under pressure.

Should employees choose the company values?

We have not found a study that settles it, so here is the trade-off. Values chosen by employees are likely to describe what already happens, which makes them recognisable but may leave out what the company needs next. Values chosen by leaders can aim higher, but stay a poster until leaders are caught living them. A workable middle: leaders propose, and teams test each one with its Tuesday question.

How often should company values change?

Rarely as words, often as examples. A list rewritten every year tells people it was never load-bearing, but the "what you would see" lines under each value should move as the company does: what Customer Focus looked like at twenty people may look different at two hundred, the growth keeping your culture when you double is about. Review the examples once a year. That is a habit, not a finding.

What is the difference between company values and behaviours?

A value is what a company holds. A behaviour is what you would see somebody do because of it. Integrity is a value; saying at the next meeting that your own figure was wrong is a behaviour. A list of company values and behaviours side by side is the more useful document, because only the second column can be caught happening.

The following Thursday

Planning again. Joel starts to say the launch date will not hold, and the head of the team starts to talk over him. Dami hears herself say it: "Sorry, can Joel finish?"

Nobody claps. Joel finishes. The meeting runs four minutes over.

That is what Courage looks like at this company now, for one Thursday. The stairwell has not changed.

• Company Values
• Core Values
• Company Culture
• Managers
• Workplace Culture