Attracting top performers to your company requires much more than just offering a competitive salary. While there’s no doubt money talks, people are also looking for a workplace that has a positive culture, opportunities for career growth, and challenging and meaningful work.

Importantly, an alignment between someone’s personal values and the corporate values of a potential workplace can be the decider when top talent evaluates job offers. It can also be the reason they stay.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report indicates that businesses with highly engaged teams, where personal and corporate values are aligned, show 23% greater profitability. It also shows that US$8.9 trillion was lost in global GDP due to low engagement, underscoring the critical importance of aligning personal and corporate values to enhance engagement and, consequently, business performance.

Value-led culture

Sally Elson, chief people officer at MYOB, says getting your values right is critical to building the right type of culture.

“The right culture is incredibly important to successfully delivering your business priorities, and to build that culture you have to get your values right,” she says.

MYOB recently consulted across the organisation and trimmed the values from six generic corporate phrases down to three powerful concepts.

“Our new values are uniquely us, they reflect who we are, and what we want to both provide to employees and what employees bring to us,” says Elson.

“We are a 34-year-old technology company, so we have to be forward thinking and always looking at what is coming. We call that value Hello Tomorrow. We celebrate our people, fostering an environment where they can be authentically themselves – so we call that the Real Deal. Thirdly, we work as a team, so Together We Win is the final value.”

Making your values unique

Using less-formal language has had a huge impact, Elson says. Rather than relying on generic words, the values are explained simply and in a way that makes it easy for someone to speak about them.

“If your values are words like ‘respectful’ and ‘communicate’, they can feel generic and don’t really say anything about who you are as a business – you could find them anywhere.

“The language we’ve used is a bit of fun and it has really resonated with people. We wanted to express our values in a way that was meaningful to who we are and the personality that we have as an organisation. People have really responded well and can understand how those values can be reflected in their work.”

Rewards and recognition

The values-led culture is bolstered by MYOB’s approach to employee life cycle moments, from recruitment to onboarding and through recognition and rewards available in its employee benefits platform, Elson says.

“The employee benefits platform is a way of celebrating our people, through retail discounts, financial wellness tools, and health and wellbeing programs. These are available when we onboard our new starters, offering resources to help them balance work and life. We also provide it in our business software, so our customers can use it.

“We think of it as a way of helping people manage their wellness: physical, mental and financial.”

Find out more:

To learn more about MYOB and its employee benefits, visit myob.com/au/employee-benefits