The Benefits of Empowering People to Live Their Values
Sunrise is your big-picture guide to employee well-being. Designed for HR, internal communications, and corporate wellness leaders, we share actionable steps to positively impact your organization.
Topline
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• According to a CNBC article, “more than half of Americans wouldn’t even consider a position at a company that didn’t share their values.”
• A useful start-of-year exercise for employees involves aligning personal values with their employer’s.
• Managers can also be challenged to include values-centric conversations when hiring and mentoring.
• Hire Chasing the Sun to help turn your employee feedback into useful programming to advance business objectives.
Our personal well-being has been a volatile experience lately. And that’s probably an understatement.
The Challenge
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• We’ve learned much about each other over the last several years. Employees used to accept the way they were treated. Today, people have realized their life doesn’t need to be tied directly to their job. They can be who they are and work for companies that will accept that and help them become the person they want to become.
• The companies allowing their employees to be who they are and live their values will be the ones who retain those people, make them more productive, and ultimately make their company more money.
• When companies communicate their values in a way that separates them from prospective competitors, job seekers will notice.
The Opportunity
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• Do I, as an employee, know the values of my employer? Have I compared my employer’s values to mine?
• Have I, as an employer, effectively communicated our values to our employees? How do we know that is true?
The Solution
Employees, we encourage you to do the following:
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Know your employer's values.
Ask your manager or other leaders how they identify with or live those values. If you run your own company, review and refresh your values.
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Ask: do these align to mine?
Understand how your values align with your company’s values. You should avoid working at companies whose values interfere with what is important to you!
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Identify your priorities.
Identify three things for your well-being to focus on this year aligning with those values. Examples include hiring a financial planner, volunteering for a professional association, or blocking an hour daily for exercise.
Employers, we encourage you to do the following:
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Ensure hiring managers are trained.
Ensure hiring managers know your company’s values and help them understand how to communicate them during the interview process best.
Encourage new people managers to spend one hour every six months thinking about how their company’s values align with their values.
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Conduct a communications assessment.
Assess how your company’s values are consistently and strategically communicated at your workplace.
Examples: Include company values at the top of every internal meeting agenda, or reference them when praising others (directs, peers, and bosses) for outstanding work and how they tie to those values.
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Encourage employees to share.
Encourage your employees to share examples of using your company’s values to improve their well-being.
Example: Chasing the Sun’s values are respect for time, transparency, and professionalism. If a Chasing the Sun employee told us this month they preplanned their entire 2023 paid time off schedule (as I used to do during my career), we might give them a spot bonus for prioritizing their well-being.
Work With Chasing the Sun.
We look forward to learning more about you and how we can play a role. Please fill out the form below, and we will respond to your request within 48 business hours.