Company Values That Aren't Corporate Nonsense
"Integrity. Excellence. Innovation. Teamwork." If that list feels familiar it is because every company in the world has some version of it pinned to a wall. And nobody, not leadership, not employees, not candidates, has ever made a real decision because of it.
Company values that actually work are the opposite of this. They are specific, unusual, sometimes uncomfortable, and they drive real trade-offs. Here is how to write them.
The test: would you hire someone who does the opposite?
A real value forces a choice. If the opposite is still acceptable, it is not a value, it is a platitude.
"We value teamwork" fails this test, nobody values "working alone and ignoring the team." But "We prefer small teams of senior people over large teams of juniors" forces a hiring trade-off, a structure trade-off, and a budget trade-off. That is a value.
Write values the way Netflix did
Netflix's original culture deck is the most copied HR document of the last 15 years for a reason. It contains lines like "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package" and "We hire adults and treat them like adults." These are uncomfortable, opinionated, and actionable. You cannot misread them.
Your values should pass the same test. A stranger reading them should know exactly what trade-offs your company makes.
The 5-step process for writing real values
- Ask your best employees what they love about the company. Specific, real stories, not abstract traits. "We shipped that feature in 6 days when I was told it would take a month elsewhere." That is a value in disguise.
- Ask your hardest feedback. Do former employees who left on good terms. Ask: "What did we value that other companies don't?" Their answers are gold.
- Draft 3-5 values in plain language. No jargon, no synonyms of "excellence."
- For each value, write one sentence describing the opposite trade-off. If you cannot name a real trade-off, the value is fake.
- Test them on decisions you already made. Did the values predict the choice? If not, either the values or the decision is wrong.
Examples of real values from real companies
- Stripe: "Move with urgency and focus." (Not "we value speed", it explicitly trades off polish for momentum.)
- Amazon: "Disagree and commit." (Trades harmony for healthy conflict.)
- Basecamp: "Long-term thinking over quarterly panic." (Trades speed for durability, the opposite of Stripe's.)
- Figma: "Grow as we grow." (Trades outside hiring for internal promotion.)
Notice how each of these forces a real choice. A company that claims all four of these values at once has no values, it just has a thesaurus.
How values show up day-to-day
Values that live only in the employee handbook are dead. Real values show up in:
- Hiring scorecards. Every interview rates the candidate on your specific values.
- Performance reviews. Values become half of the rating scale. See performance reviews for small teams.
- Recognition. When you publicly recognize a teammate, name the specific value they embodied. See employee recognition that costs nothing.
- Firing decisions. "They were great at the job but they violated our values" is a legitimate reason to let someone go, and a sign your values are real.
What not to do
- Don't copy another company's values. Yours need to reflect your actual trade-offs, not someone else's.
- Don't make them generic. "Innovation" and "teamwork" are not values; they are dictionary entries.
- Don't write more than 5. Nobody remembers more than 5. Three is better.
- Don't change them every year. Real values are stable. If yours need to keep evolving, you never had values, you had a marketing exercise.
Values are a leadership practice
Writing the values is the easy part. Enforcing them, especially when a top performer violates them, is what separates real cultures from fake ones. If you build them into weekly 1-on-1s and hiring, they become real. If they stay on a poster, they die.
TracefyHR lets you embed your values into performance reviews, recognition, and hiring scorecards using Forge AI. See how it works →