A Culture of Core Values
As a Path to Safety, Health, and Wellbeing
When we live and express our core values at work, we create a culture that can permeate our lives. Indeed, a core culture of dignity, respect, and personal excellence can enhance our lives both at work and at home. With these values, we are able to integrate and enliven our relationships with our family, friends, community, and our work. However, in order to protect this culture, workers must be protected not only through their physical safety, but also through their emotional and psychological safety. To promote the total wellbeing of each worker, we must engage the entire person. A well-crafted message within a well-designed physical workplace provides little help if workers are distracted by an emotionally threatening or a psychologically negative work environment.
However, specific management styles and practices can create a positive workplace that engages, supports, and promotes the entire person; the right leadership can invite each worker to participate in creating their own work environment. Workers’ personal ownership, investment, and creativity can then build greater focus, decrease stress, and ultimately promote self-respect, wellbeing, and personal dignity. Dignity arises when our work environment provides an opportunity to express and communicate who we are. As a result, dignity and wellbeing provide an environment where good work, including safe work, can succeed and where workers can flourish.
The timing of communicating our culture of values is essential. Traditionally, the workplace has been viewed as an environment for efficiency and success where we later add key features such as safety and health, and more recently, wellbeing. This sequence is understandable as companies strive for solvency and profit. The sequence may initially succeed during the short-term. However, it is not sustainable. The goal of short-term efficiency and productivity risks creating attitudes of efficiency-at-all-costs and just-do-what-I-tell-you, resulting in potential stagnation or decline. Thus, the communication of core human values must come first and can easily be integrated into every work relationship and conversation. Here, efficiency and productivity arise organically from workers’ core values in a culture that honors workers and our potential to flourish.