Company Values in Action: How to Incorporate Them in Performance Reviews

We made one structural change that turned company values from a poster on the wall into something performance reviews actually use: every formal review at our clinic includes two questions tied directly to our stated values, and the answers carry equal weight to clinical or operational metrics.

At our private addiction treatment clinic near Warsaw, our core operational values are patient dignity, clinical honesty, and team accountability. These sound generic until you operationalize them. In reviews, we ask: “Give me one example from the past six months where you chose patient dignity over operational convenience,” and “Give me one example where you raised a concern that nobody else was raising.” If someone cannot produce specific examples, that’s the feedback. The value either shows up in their work or it does not.

One concrete example from a recent review with an intake coordinator: she described a moment when a high-net-worth family pushed for an admission timeline that would have skipped our standard pre-admission medical screening for a patient with significant comorbidities. The operationally convenient path was to compress the timeline and admit. She pushed back, escalated to me, and we held the admission for proper screening. That decision delayed a high-value admission by 72 hours, which under purely commercial metrics would have looked like a coordinator slowing down revenue. Under our actual values, it was the highest-performing decision she made that quarter. Her review reflected that explicitly.

The lesson I would offer other operators: if your company values do not show up as specific behaviors you can name in writing during a review, they are not values, they are marketing copy. The discipline of asking for examples forces clarity on both sides. Employees stop treating values as background noise. Managers stop letting commercially convenient outcomes override the principles the company claims to operate by.

One operational note: this only works if leadership models it visibly. The first time a manager rewards a values-violating outcome because it hit a number, the system collapses. Consistency is non-negotiable.

Andrzej Kulesza, Co-Founder & Medical Director, Zeus Detox & Rehab

Paperless Pipeline has been remote since 2009 and our team is small, fewer than 50 people. When you cannot rely on hallway osmosis, your performance reviews carry more weight, so the values question is operational, not philosophical.

Our values are short and we use them verbatim in reviews. “Boring on purpose. Customer first. Ship every six weeks. Stay small.” Each review has a section per value and a single prompt. Show me a specific example from the last quarter where you lived this, and one where you fell short.

I will give you a concrete case. We have a support engineer who answered a tier-3 ticket from a 12-agent brokerage in Idaho last spring. The customer was paying us $125 a month. The fix took her four working days because the root cause turned out to be a state-level compliance edge case that none of our standard playbooks covered. Her manager flagged it in review under “Customer first” with the exact line item, the four days, the eventual fix, and the impact. The customer is still with us. That review entry now sits in our internal handbook as the canonical example of what “customer first” means in practice. New hires read it in week one.

The mistake I made in earlier years: writing values like marketing copy, then bolting them onto reviews as adjectives. “She demonstrates customer focus.” That is useless. The fix was to require a story plus a number plus an outcome for each value, written by the manager, signed off by the employee. If neither side can produce a story, the value either is not lived or is not measurable. Both are problems worth surfacing.

One more practical detail. We tie the “Ship every six weeks” value to a hard cadence number per role. For engineers it is “shipped meaningful improvement in 4 of the last 6 release cycles.” For support, “first-response time held under two hours for 95% of tickets in the cycle.” The value is the why. The number is the proof.

Values without numbers turn into mood. Numbers without values turn into burnout. The review is the place to keep both honest.

Our company values are about depth over surface. We sell preparation materials that teach HR concepts deeply rather than helping people memorize answers, so it would be hypocritical for us to evaluate our own team on shallow metrics.

The way that shows up in performance reviews is a single recurring question I ask every direct report: “Show me a piece of work from this quarter that someone could not have produced without you specifically.” The qualifier matters. Output volume and hours invested are useful inputs, but the answer to that question requires identifying work that depended on their judgment, their context, their taste.

This question changes the whole tenor of the conversation. People come into performance reviews ready to defend their volume, list everything they shipped, walk through their KPI dashboard. Those things matter, but they describe activity. The “someone could not have produced without you” question forces them to identify the work that actually proved their value.

A specific example. A content lead on my team last review cycle wanted to walk me through the forty articles she had published. Solid output. I redirected the conversation to one piece in particular: a deeply researched explainer on a misunderstood section of federal labor law that she had pushed to expand against my initial guidance. The article was technically slower to produce and got less traffic than her quick-hit posts, but customers were citing it in support emails as the reason they trusted our materials. That piece was hers in a way the forty quick posts were not. It was the work that mattered most for the year, and the volume conversation would have buried it.

This approach is harder for both of us. It requires me to know the work in detail rather than glancing at output dashboards. It requires the team member to reflect on what makes their contribution distinctive. The payoff is that my team knows what kind of work earns attention, and they shape their year around producing it.

Kevin Byford, SPHR, Founder, HRStudyPro

Most companies treat values as poster material. They show up in the onboarding deck, the careers page, maybe a quarterly all-hands slide. Then performance review season hits and the conversation is entirely about output metrics, with values mentioned as an afterthought if at all.

That gap is where culture quietly dies.

We changed how we run reviews about eighteen months ago, and the shift came from a problem we kept seeing. We had team members hitting every output target who were quietly making the team worse to work with. Slow to share context, defensive in feedback, hoarding client knowledge. On paper they were performing. In practice they were costing us trust internally.

So we built what I call a values-weighted review. Every review now has two scores, not one. Output score covers the standard deliverables, deadlines, client outcomes. Values score covers four behaviors we actually care about: clarity in communication, willingness to be wrong publicly, depth over speed, and protecting the next person’s work.

The rule is simple. You cannot get a promotion or a raise on output alone. If your values score is below threshold, you stay where you are regardless of what your numbers look like.

A specific example. We had a senior strategist last year, strong performer, consistently delivered, clients loved him. Output score was excellent. But three teammates flagged in 360 feedback that he rarely documented his thinking, which meant nobody could pick up his accounts when he was out. His values score on “protecting the next person’s work” came in low.

We held the promotion. Had a direct conversation about exactly what was missing and why output alone was not enough. He pushed back at first. Two quarters later, he had rebuilt his documentation habits, became one of the strongest internal mentors on the team, and got the promotion in the next cycle with both scores aligned.

The lesson for us was this. Values only mean something when they have weight in the decisions people actually care about. Money, title, growth. Put them in the room where those decisions get made, or admit you do not really have values, you have marketing.

At memelord.com, one of our core values is “ship fast and learn faster.” In every performance conversation, I don’t just ask what someone accomplished. I ask what they shipped and what it taught us. If someone spent weeks on something that never launched, that’s a conversation. If someone shipped something imperfect but learned from it and iterated, that’s a win regardless of the raw output metric. Values only mean something if they change how you reward behavior, not just what you post on the wall.

One specific example: a team member missed a launch deadline but wrote a thorough postmortem that prevented three future mistakes. Under a purely output-based review, that looks like a failure. Under our values framework, that’s exactly what we want. The question I always come back to in reviews is “did you act like someone who lives this value, or just someone who knows it?” That gap is where actual culture lives.

We made each value a measurable dimension on the review rubric, not a paragraph at the bottom. One of our values is “ship the rough draft” – bias toward shipping imperfect work for feedback rather than polishing in isolation. In reviews, every employee answers a specific prompt: “name one project where you shipped earlier than felt comfortable, and what happened.” Engineers and salespeople alike have to produce real evidence. A salesperson once described sending a half-built ROI calculator to a prospect and closing a $90k deal because the buyer wanted to influence the final version. That story became a hiring artifact. When values are scored with examples, they stop being posters and start shaping behavior.

Every review at our firm runs through one question: did the work we delivered hold up, or did it just close a ticket? Our values aren’t posters — they’re “build compliance that lasts” and “hire the people the work is actually for.” Both are falsifiable, which is the point.

One of our auditors was moving fast through remediation tickets, hitting volume, but the fixes were technically correct and practically useless — screen reader users on our own team flagged them. In her review I didn’t open with throughput. I asked her to sit with two of our testers who use assistive tech daily and walk through her last five deliverables. She came back and rewrote her own QA checklist. Her ticket count dropped the next quarter and her client retention went up — which on a retainer model is the number that actually pays rent.

If your values can’t lose you a deal or change a review, you don’t have values, you have decoration.

I’m Runbo Li, Co-founder & CEO at Magic Hour.

We don’t do traditional performance reviews. David and I are a two-person team that’s built a platform with millions of users, so the feedback loop isn’t quarterly, it’s constant. But the core value we hold each other to is simple: bias toward shipping over perfecting.

That value shows up in every conversation we have about what to build next. The question is never “is this polished enough?” It’s “does this solve the problem fast enough for the user to feel it today?”

Here’s a specific example. Late last year, we noticed a spike in users dropping off during our video rendering flow. The instinct might be to run a deep research cycle, survey users, build a product spec. Instead, I flagged it to David on a Monday morning, and by Tuesday night we had a completely redesigned progress experience live in production. No committee. No slide deck. We shipped it, watched the numbers, and iterated from there. Drop-off fell meaningfully within the week.

That’s the “review” in real time. When one of us hesitates or over-engineers something, the other calls it out immediately. Not in a formal sit-down, but in the moment. “Are we shipping or are we stalling?” That one sentence is our entire performance framework.

The reason this works is because the value is embedded in how we operate, not in a document we revisit twice a year. Most companies treat values like wall art. They look nice but nobody references them when making a Tuesday afternoon decision. For us, the value IS the decision-making filter.

If your values only show up during reviews, they’re not values. They’re decoration.

Performance reviews at most companies follow a familiar formula: goals set, goals measured, score assigned, conversation had. I’ve never found that approach particularly useful, and honestly, it never felt like us.

At HVM Communications, our values show up in how we work every single day, so that anchors how we evaluate performance too.

One value that runs through everything we do is intentionality. We don’t take on work just because we can do it well. We take on work that aligns with our mission and moves the needle for our clients in a meaningful way. So when I sit down with a team member for a review, one of the first questions I ask is: “Where did you show up with intention this quarter, and where did you find yourself just going through the motions?”

That question opens a completely different conversation than a traditional review does. It invites self-reflection rather than self-defense. It creates space for someone to be honest about where they felt energized and where they felt disconnected, and that information is far more valuable to me than a performance rating.

The outcome has been reviews that actually mean something. Team members come prepared to have a real conversation, instead of just protecting their job. Those conversations have led to better role alignment, stronger client work, and people who feel genuinely seen rather than simply evaluated.

Values only mean something when they’re embedded in how you operate. Otherwise they’re just words.

At Eprezto, we do not have traditional performance reviews. Instead, our values are embedded into how we evaluate work every single week through our growth review meetings.

The specific example is how we operationalized ownership, which is one of our core values. Instead of listing ownership on a wall and hoping people internalize it, we built it into the structure of how work is presented and evaluated.

Every week, each team member presents their own work, their results, and what they would do differently. They are not evaluated by a manager reading metrics from a dashboard. They evaluate themselves first. That structure is ownership in practice, not theory.

When someone consistently identifies their own gaps, proposes solutions, and follows through without being prompted, that is ownership showing up in real work. When someone consistently needs to be asked for updates or waits for direction before acting, the absence of ownership is equally visible without anyone needing to point it out.

This approach works because values are demonstrated through behavior, not discussed in annual reviews. By the time a traditional company sits down for a yearly review and says you need to show more ownership, months of misalignment have already passed. When values are visible weekly, course correction happens naturally and immediately.

The outcome is that our team does not think of values as abstract principles. They experience them as the way work gets done. Ownership is not something we talk about. It is something you see every week when someone stands up and says here is what I did, here is what worked, and here is what I am fixing.

The values that actually show up in reviews aren’t the ones on the wall. They’re the ones I find myself returning to when describing why a piece of work was good or where it fell short.

For us that’s mostly about craft and honesty with clients. Craft meaning the standard of the work itself, not just whether it shipped. Honesty meaning whether someone told the client the uncomfortable thing when it mattered, or quietly let a bad decision through to avoid the conversation.

The specific example I’d give is a project review where the build had gone well technically and the client was happy. By every conventional measure it was a successful project. But during the work, the person leading it had spotted that a feature the client insisted on was going to underperform, and hadn’t pushed back hard enough. The feature shipped. Six weeks later the data showed exactly what we’d predicted, and the client came back asking for it to be redesigned at extra cost. The project earned more money because of that, and it still counted as a failure in our review, because the value we care about is telling clients the hard truth early, not collecting follow-on work from problems we saw coming.

That conversation, in the review, was more useful than any KPI. The person involved didn’t lose anything for it. The point was establishing that the standard we hold each other to isn’t the visible outcome. It’s the call you made in the moment when nobody would have known if you’d quietly let it slide.

The values get real when they’re the lens you use to evaluate work that, by all the surface metrics, looked fine.

One thing we’ve learned at Prose is that company values can’t just live on a careers page collecting dust like motivational wallpaper. If values never show up in hiring, feedback, or promotions, they’re basically decorative fiction.

A specific example for us is how we evaluate responsiveness and ownership. In an agency environment, clients don’t really care whose “job” something technically is when a deadline’s on fire. So during reviews, we look closely at whether someone proactively solves problems or waits to be told what to do. Somebody who jumps in, communicates clearly, and protects the client experience gets recognized fast, even if the issue started outside their lane.

We also try to make feedback feel behavioral instead of vague. Saying “be more collaborative” is useless corporate soup. Saying “the client trusted you because you kept them informed before problems escalated” is actionable and memorable. People improve faster when they understand the real-world impact of their behavior instead of getting hit with abstract HR buzzwords.

Honestly, the biggest thing is consistency. If leadership says they value initiative, transparency, and accountability but rewards politics or chaos instead, employees notice immediately. Culture isn’t what’s written down. It’s what gets rewarded when things get stressful.

Company values belong in performance reviews only if they are linked to outcomes people can influence. In a technical environment, the strongest values are usually visible in communication habits, decision making, and follow through. Reviews should ask whether someone increased confidence, reduced avoidable risk, and made collaboration easier during high stakes work. I prefer feedback that names the behavior, the business effect, and what should happen next, because that is what people can actually improve.

A memorable example came from a manager who paused a fast moving release discussion after noticing key assumptions were undocumented. She brought the right stakeholders together, surfaced hidden dependency risk, and prevented a last minute failure. That was a values moment because discipline protected both execution and trust.

We start by separating values from vague culture language. If a value cannot guide a decision it is not useful in a review. We want people to clearly understand how trust is built. We define it through consistency transparency and early problem sharing. This gives managers a practical way to coach without drifting into opinion.

In one feedback session a high performer moved fast but skipped process discipline because he felt speed justified shortcuts. We looked at the downstream effect instead of the shortcut itself. Others had to verify his work and timelines became less predictable and small errors took longer to fix. We tied the conversation to long term ownership rather than short term heroics and he shifted from doing more to building cleaner habits.

At Atty, working with a global team of 100 plus engineers and designers for Fortune 100 and 500 clients, we learned that the hard way. Early on we treated values like discussion points in reviews. People would say the right things, but it didn’t change how work got done. So we shifted everything to observable behavior from real projects.

Performance reviews now pull from actual delivery moments. Not “Are you collaborative?” but what happened during a specific sprint, a client escalation, or a production fire drill. How did you communicate when scope changed? Did you block work or help unblock it? What did your actions do to delivery risk?

One clear example from a Fortune 500 project. Scope kept shifting mid delivery. One senior engineer kept pushing back early because certain design changes would break backend stability. At the time, some of the team read it as resistance. In review, we treated it as ownership under pressure. He was right on the technical side, but the feedback also called out how his communication style slowed trust with designers. So the value showed up in two ways at once, protecting delivery but needing adjustment in how disagreement is handled.

At Motion Design School, the same idea applies but through student outcomes. One instructor was technically strong, solid output, but student drop off kept repeating in his modules. In review, that mattered more than his teaching confidence. We tied performance to completion rates and confusion points, not just content quality. That shifted his behavior fast. He started adjusting pacing and checking understanding earlier, and retention improved in the next cycle.

What actually gets discussed in the room is always concrete. Incidents from sprints, student feedback, client signals. Not personality traits. Not abstract values. Sometimes it is uncomfortable because it removes vague explanations. But it forces reality into the conversation, which is the point.

My company values include professionalism, respectful communication, reliability, attention to detail, and creating a good experience for the client from start to finish. Since we work inside people’s homes, I believe a big part of the job is not just the service itself, but also how the client feels while we’re there.

During performance reviews and feedback sessions, I try to tie feedback back to those values instead of only focusing on productivity or numbers. For example, if someone handled a stressful situation calmly, communicated well with the client, or made a client feel comfortable during a difficult project, I make sure to point that out specifically.

One example that stood out was a client who felt overwhelmed and embarrassed before an organizing session. One of my team members did a great job making the client feel comfortable and never judged throughout the process. The client later left a review mentioning how supported and respected they felt during the session. During the feedback conversation, I used that as an example of the kind of client experience I want our company to be known for.

We incorporate our values by making performance reviews grounded in respect and psychological safety, so people can absorb feedback without fear. One specific way I do this, especially when I need to give tough feedback, is to start the conversation by saying, “Your job is not at risk.” That simple step lowers the temperature and keeps the focus on learning and improvement instead of defensiveness. Because we are fully remote, I also ask whether they feel pressure to always be the green dot on Slack, since that can signal unhealthy expectations. From there, we can discuss clear actions and support while keeping boundaries and well-being in view.

We don’t want our company’s values just to be a generic catch phrase that is easy to put on a slide and never to impact day-to-day operations. When we appraise our employees, we not only consider their level of accomplishment, we also look at how they behave, communicate, take ownership, and contribute to the overall team environment.

One of our key values at this company is “ownership.” When there are problems that occur quickly in hiring and staffing (i.e., candidates cancel or drop out, clients change their requirements, or there are delays in timelines), we value recruiters who come forward to let us know about the issue (via proactive communication) and also present solutions rather than excuses.

For instance, when an employee lost a strong candidate late in the process but was still transparent with the client about the candidate dropping, they immediately communicated this issue to the client (who was very appreciative) with full transparency and provided two alternative candidates for the client within 24 hours after informing the client about the lack of candidate in the process. While the placement of the candidate was delayed and required significant effort to relocate, this type of behavior will be rewarded by how we value the employee at the Company.

Finally, values will have real impact only to the extent that they affect promotions, recognition, and trust – not just on the wall in the form of a poster.

Since the beginning, Huntress has proudly leaned into its values, with equity, diversity, flexibility and authenticity at the core of how we work. Naturally, these values are also an important part of our performance reviews and feedback sessions, as we use these opportunities to emphasize open dialogue, transparency and belonging. In practice, that means we provide continuous, constructive feedback that’s actionable and reinforces what we want our company to represent.

One specific way we achieve this is through Huntress Academy, our virtual everboarding program. This was designed specifically to reinforce our values, brand, and ways of working for new and existing teammates as they develop what we call a ‘security DNA’ mindset. Having been in place for some time now, we can say the program has been a massive success, with 70%+ of the entire company completing the sessions.

During feedback sessions and performance reviews, we’ll often encourage teammates to engage with Huntress Academy as part of their ongoing growth. This is a simple way to actively reinforce our shared values in a way that feels supportive and collaborative, while also being closely aligned with our culture of continuous learning.

Our core value at Asanify goes by the acronym “SIMPLE.” To us, this name is not just another word but a standard that we like to uphold through our performance.

SIMPLE stands for:

• Simplify and Invent
• Initiate like an owner
• Move fast (responsibly)
• Probity (integrity)
• Learn and share continuously
• Execute wholeheartedly after debating respectfully

While auditing our review process, we asked ourselves a direct question: Does this process reflect our values or contradict them?

Since it contradicted, we decided to move the entire feedback loop of self-assessments, manager inputs, and goal tracking into WhatsApp and Slack, where work was already happening, instead of opening a new tab or login.

The review itself runs on three questions:

• What went well?
• What could have been done better?
• What help do you need from us?

For the first question, employees must cite specific evidence mapped against each of the SIMPLE values. Our rating scale is built to reward concrete examples of behaviour that reflect these values

This led to:

Review completion that rose above 90%. The reason is, instead of only pushing harder, we made the process frictionless—which is exactly what our values demand of us.

The takeaway: If your values are real, they should show up inside your own internal processes first. If “simplicity” is a stated value but your review cycle adds seven steps to someone’s day, you do not have a culture. You have a contradiction.

My leadership Style is Radical Candor: Care Deeply and Challenge Directly. At CARFAX, we embrace our playbook every single day and do not let it be a document or artifact collecting dust. For example, Laugh Often or Smile a Lot. This allows me to leverage my Dad jokes in my daily interactions, and lets me be who I am.

One example: I like using Start, Stop, Continue in monthly reviews or weekly 1:1s. I might tell someone, “Continue being a straight shooter with the data. Start including people early so we can get unique perspectives before the final decision is made. Stop waiting until the work is perfect before creating alignment.”

That makes the conversation more pragmatic and less biased.

I colour my values into reviews with one question: was the work done with integrity, proper preparation or communication, or was it done just because we had to finish the work? With painting, it’s not just the speed of the job; for me, it’s whether or not the homeowner felt respected from estimate to final walk-through.

A sample situation was when a crew lead completed an exterior to schedule and had overlooked a few minor clean-up items around landscaping. It wasn’t ‘work faster’ that they heard back: “The paint looks good – now make the house look like it’s being taken care of.” That basic is prevalent because there is a direct link between skill and trust.

The company values incorporated in the scorecard

Service values are kept on a poster until converted to line items on the review itself in the breakroom. Service is stress-free at the company level, which translates to 6 to 8 measurable behaviors per role. Guest message response time is less than 15 min. All 24-point checklist is accomplished at property inspection 24 hours before the guest. Owner statements are sent out by the 5th of each month with no follow-up email. There’s something tangible to put your review on when you do the conversation right there.

The focus of the feedback sessions is facilitated by using a real guest moment.

Each meeting starts with a real guest moment over the last 90 days. It may relate to a different arrival or a particular grievance or recovery from a quarter. The team member describes what happened, the value that was requested, and what they did. Truthfully, 30 minutes of, for the most part, insubstantial feedback is outweighed by this one moment. Most people are able to recite the sentence back in their own words.

Property managers, upon request, should conduct a review in a specific instance, such as in the case of stress-free arrival.

The importance of no fuss, no muss comes into play most at the seat of the property manager. Measures taken include the driver assignment confirmed 48 hours out and the AC being cooled 2 hours prior to ETA. It is closed off at 9 PM on arrival day with a courtesy check. The items are yes-or-no binary.

If the property manager who serves 5 of 5 for the quarter makes it to the arrivals, then they get a 5 on stress-free arrival. Slipping to 3 of 5 would earn a 3 and then have a coaching plan of repair during the next 60 to 90 days. The standard is recorded prior to the beginning of the quarter, for the record. The discussion ends with math, and the member of the team knows what to do to fix the behavior.

The values that a company puts into a performance review will only make a difference in the end when you can rate them, like a financial statement. The values that you can’t measure are the values your team can’t deliver.

I’ve worked at SearchTides since January 2017 as the Chief AEO SEO Officer, and I have had 20+ years’ experience working within the world of search and LLM, yet the problem keeps arising. Firms claim that their values are important to them, but then in crunch times, they become hidden away through numbers.

In finance and healthcare projects, trust is an output component. I have seen instances in which a project was held back due to the perceived dirtiness of the data. This had negative short term results, but it maintained the integrity of the long term process. It will go into the review, not as a comment on the side. In feedback, it will be said bluntly: “It got out fast, but you skipped some important steps.”

The feedback process is unstructured. I normally begin with issues, followed by blockers. For example, in an SEO project for LLM, a certain update increased traffic but decreased consistency in enterprise healthcare searches. It’s quite straightforward, and I communicated this fact in a 1 on 1, that this was a loss of trust with the client. Nothing fancy about this, just plain speaking, possibly rough, but it gets through.

In another healthcare SEO project, traffic was improved, but the quality of communication was compromised, although technically right. The outcome got me to give a rating of good results, but definitely not outstanding, considering the high risk factor. Workflow changes were made to ensure content quality despite delays.

Most managers append values at the end to explain scores. It shouldn’t be done this way. Rather, the values must be embedded in middle-of-the-quarter feedback process. This paper has shown that how something is made is as important as its final form.

Review must resemble a reminiscence about the quarter. It must contain real-life instances, real-life compromises, even the uncomfortable ones. It is there the values truly reside.

Our brand centers genuine, human creativity and unique brand voices. One of the “fun” bonuses we offer every quarter is the award for “best Easter egg”. We encourage our creative professionals to work little jokes, details, and references into their content, especially in collaboration with clients. We vote on which one we like best, and it’s one of the funnest things we do in terms of performance reviews.

One of the values that has made our business successful is a focus on mutual support. Rather than holding everyone strictly accountable for their own work, we use a hybrid approach to performance reviews where individual performance is held in balance with a focus on collaboration and especially on helping others in ad-hoc situations to get things done more quickly. We solicit this information from other employees; we’ll always ask them about who has helped them succeed this review period, and how.