Company culture is vital to an organization and culture is driven by values.

Does your organization have stated and written values?

Some do. A few companies have thought about it. Others have values, yet don't follow them.

[If you don't have written company values, I'd suggest reading The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.]

For those of you who do have written values, do your employees know what those values are? Can they recite them? Can they give examples of how those values are played out in the workplace? Do those values guide their decisions?

For that matter, do they guide your decisions as an owner or manager? If not, then it might not actually be a true value and you need to reevaluate what truly is important to your organization.

All of the ping-pong tables and catered Friday lunches won't cover up a poor company culture.

Incorporating stated company values into the fabric of your company is a must if they are going to actually mean anything.

But how can that actually be accomplished?

How to Incorporate Values into a Company: Real Examples

At BigWing, a digital marketing agency, we rolled out new values in January of 2016.

They are SPICCEE in case you were wondering: Stewardship, Passion, Integrity, Community, Creativity, Excellence, and Education.

So far, we've figured out several ways to incorporate our values into our processes and culture. I'm sure there many more ways, but it's a start.

Here are a few ways we at BigWing have started to incorporate our values into the organization:

Our values are written down. This might seem like I'm stating the obvious, but they are on paper and agreed upon by the leadership team. It starts here and trickles down to the rest of the team. Include values in recruiting materials. We have a cool blog that potential hires read that talks about our values. By doing this, we attract applicants who resonate with our SPICCEE values. Hire for values- Our interview questions are aligned with certain values. We even have a checklist of our SPICCEE values for those conducting interviews, so we can write examples of how they see those values throughout the interview process or in the candidate's past work history. Instill your values during onboarding- When a new employee comes onboard, you have an opportunity to plunge them into the culture. Give them the values, so they can be visible. We review our values during our 'Intro to BigWing' and give real examples of how each value has been lived out by our employees. Reward your Values- If values are not reinforced, they'll die. Keep them active and reward employees for living them out. Our employees can nominate each other via Survey Monkey for different values. Each month, nominations are read and flair is given (along with BigWing Bucks) if it was their first time to win that value. An overall employee of the month is chosen based on nominations and management input. They don't win a closer parking space for a month, but the prizes ain't bad. Sport your flair: Keep your values top O' mind by having them visible. We currently do this through our magnetic values flair. Stroll around the office and see how many pieces of values flair someone has on their cube to see how SPICCEE they are. In the future, I hope to see our SPICCEE values on mugs and T-shirts, but that's also because I've always wanted a Zazzle store. Bring up values during meetings- This point is aspirational, but something we want to do more often. I'd like to do better at recognizing someone in a smaller group meeting for being SPICCEE. I'd also like to talk about decisions, in light of our values and explain decisions based off of our values. Highlight values in internal communication- In our internal newsletter "The Feather" (we're convinced it's the best internal newsletter that exists), we highlight a value each month. Support your values, even it costs time and money- You know the thing about integrity? It sometimes costs in the short term. We had an occasion where we're weren't following the terms of services (unknowingly) of a certain product and a specialist brought this to our attention. We could have swept it under the rug, but we did the right thing and fixed it. It was painful and burned a lot of hours, but it was the right thing to do. Specialists now know that we actually respect Integrity as a value, since we put our money where our mouth is.

If culture eats strategy for lunch, then values are the teeth needed to bite that bologna sandwich.

How do you incorporate values into the daily rhythms of your organization? Love to hear your thoughts.

Brent Pittman leads the largest content marketing team in the state of Oklahoma (seriously it's big) and enjoys helping businesses solve problems through creative and helpful content marketing.