Company Values - How to get your employees to understand and imbibe them?

Every company has a well defined set of Values – Almost every “Values” list I have seen has the same content – Integrity, Respect for Others, Customer Delight etc. Over the last 2 weeks, I asked a dozen companies what they do to reinforce the Values and help their employees imbibe them on a day-to-day basis. The answers ranged from “That is a good question – I don’t think we do anything about it”, to “We have our “Values” posters displayed at various vantage points – e.g. Cafeterias, Conference rooms, Screensavers on all employee computers etc. “
Eleven out of the dozen executives asked me “What do other companies do? Do you have any suggestions?”
A Recognition Program can be used as a fantastic tool to reinforce company Values on a day-to-day basis. You can have a simple Peer-2-Peer Recognition program, where every employee can recognize any other employee using an e-Card (with or without any value/gift associated with it). All the recognition can force the nominator to pick 1 or 2 of the company “Values” and a small text box, where the specifics of the nomination (Why does the nominator want to recognize the recipient?), can be included.
On the same lines, you can create an easy-to-use Spot Reward program, where the primary or one of the reasons for the recognition can be “a Value” – a behavior or an action of the employee that is aligned with one of the company’s Values.
From an employee perspective, now “Values” become much more than senior management reading them off a slide or seeing the words on a poster or on their screen-savers. They get something tangible, something they value, for exhibiting behaviours and actions aligned to those Values. If this is done consistently over a 2-3 year period, the Values will become a part of the company’s DNA.