I first became aware of this concept more more than 15 years ago when a colleague of mine was working on a Values Statement project for a large global company. As he explained the objectives and shared a draft, I started to get very skeptical. We got into a lengthy discussion about companies that spend a lot of time stressing their values and making employees commit to written policy guidelines after appropriate training. Notwithstanding these efforts, the media regularly exposes examples, in both the private sector and in government, where published guidelines are not followed, even under threat of criminal prosecution.
This is not to say that values cannot change, just that employers will not be able to make this happen. There are, in fact, many situations where individuals “get religion” are inspired by a serious illness or become repentant following punishment or public humiliation, to give a few examples.
