From the outside, you can always tell the internal culture of a company if you pay close enough attention. As a customer. As a potential candidate. The way a company’s employees and processes treat external current and potential stakeholders will tell you all you need to know about how the company operates internally, what their values are, and how they most likely treat their employees.

Do they value their employees or are they “required” pieces to achieve the company’s goal? Do they understand that without their employees, they don’t have a company? Or do they falsely think that without customers they don’t have a company, and just kind of skip over the employee layer? (When a company tells their team “All that matters is the customer” then that is telling the team that they aren’t as important.)

Impact on Sales and Customer Experience

If the team doesn’t feel valued, they will pass that feeling down in their sales and service conversations. If the company has a stated or unstated core value focused on growth and profitability, the sales team will pass that value on in their calls, pushing people to close and pay as much as possible.

Core Values and Organizational Costs

If a core corporate value is to be the best in their industry, what cost are they willing to pay to get there? For candidates, do they give them the courtesy of responding? Or are they too busy and reactive?

Are they moving forward candidates that could be a good fit (and not just looking for some weird, exact match that someone created in a document from their experiences of who has worked and not worked in the past)? Are they responsive to outreach or completely keeping everyone at bay?

Workload Pressures and Core Values

From being a part of a lot of companies, especially observing as a consultant, I know that there are candidates you can’t get back to, times when everyone is stressed or underwater in their workload, when the company needs results and there is a push for that. But all of that still represents the core values of an organization.

Being ‘too busy’ is still a choice and most of the time it’s an indication of something in the core values – those unstated values that probably aren’t actually written out – that has set the tone for the organization.

The Importance of Mission, Vision, and Core Values

If you lead an organization, you might not think you need a mission and vision statement and core values. You might think that’s just something ‘big’ companies do, or something a consultant/advisor tells you to do so you can hire them.

Unfortunately – here is the truth. Every org has a mission, vision, and core values. There is something by default that represents how the owner/founder/CEO feels about the company, the employees, the customer, and the world.

If there is no intention put into getting clear on those and ensuring that everyone’s actions align with the mission, vision, and core values, then people will default to doing what’s in their best interests.

Conclusion

The values you hold your employees will determine how they treat your customers and future employees. Take some time to think about how you feel about your employees and how you truly honestly treat them. Then take another batch of time to observe how they are treating your potential customers, customers, and candidates.