Imagine you’re on the receiving end of an email from the CEO with the subject line “Agenda for Today’s All-Hands Call.” Surprise!

Surprise that it came direct from the CEO—and surprise that the agenda includes only one item, “Our Values.”

The CEO opens the call: “Today we are not going to review quarterly results. We’re not talking about net new premium. We’re not talking about our product lines or agency commission schedule.

“We’re here to restart the conversation about our six core values. Remember those? Maybe you’ve seen them hanging up somewhere in the office?

“Are they making any sense to you? Do we actually believe in them? Are we following them? What are we doing to live the values we wrote down a decade ago?

“These are the questions we’re tackling on this call and with future discussions.”

Whether they are national companies with field offices around the country or global companies with locations in different countries around the world, executives in the home office seek the holy grail of a consistent culture. While that culture may thrive at the home office, how can leaders be sure that the culture is infused throughout the entire company?

While it won’t solve all cultural issues for a distributed workforce, the North Star is a set of core values.

Here are some considerations:

1. This isn’t an HR project.

In fact, human resources shouldn’t “own” culture, just as marketing shouldn’t own brand. Guided by a powerful conviction beginning with the C-suite, every employee is a voice here; everyone is an owner of culture and brand.

Having said that, from an HR perspective, core values might be the only “employee manual” that matters. Because when a company is values-driven, you don’t need thick guidebooks for everything. People can operate, communicate and make decisions all around the world in relation to the values. The result is more efficiency, more autonomy and more personal achievement. Leadership needs to uphold the values but needn’t micromanage individuals.

2. Write them down.

Your list of five to eight core values literally guides how employees should behave. And if you don’t discuss and prepare written core values, and they’re not freely shared around the organization, they don’t exist at all. In that case, workers will freelance, making up their own culture guideposts as they go. The less connected they are from the mother ship, the more freelancing you’ll see.

At the same time, core values, like people, are somewhat flexible. Offices around the world may have different tweaks. “Communicate honestly” might feel different in Chicago vs. Zurich, but mutual trust can still back it all up.

3. Be authentic and specific.

Core values describe how workers should behave at your company, not some other company. “Create fun and a little weirdness” works well for Las Vegas-based shoe retailer Zappos, but would it work for a super-regional P/C carrier?

If your culture isn’t truly open to change, then a value such as “Challenge the status quo” will be an issue. As workers follow that tenant, they’ll be free—encouraged, in fact—to raise a hand in a department meeting and ask something such as, “Our customer onboarding process seems stale. We’ve done it the same way for as long as I can remember. Why don’t we rethink the whole shebang?” That sort of corporate conflict will be OK when workers trust each other.

Since values literally guide employee behavior, make them personal. Avoid platitudes and clichés such as “The customer is always right.”

Here are some examples of dynamic, positive core values at various companies in the insurance industry:

• Learn, unlearn, relearn.
• Challenge ourselves and each other.
• Love what you do.
• Do more with less.
• Communicate honestly.
• Be fearless and wildly creative.
• Encourage and embrace innovation.
• Be joyful/Have fun.

Each of these values would be an excellent conversation starter in the C-suite, in each region and in each department. Just as “brand” is what people say about you behind your back, “culture” is how you behave when the boss isn’t in the building—which happens often with a distributed workforce.

4. Use supporting tools.

Some team-building events can work across the organization, no matter where people work. For example, if a “department of the month” receives some sort of award, even token, make sure everyone in the department—including home office, regional offices and remote workers – receive the same thing on the same day.

In a decentralized organization, the lack of physical interaction can make it more challenging to understand how people are feeling about the culture, as you cannot read their body language or experience their emotions. Video conferencing tools can build more personal rapport among remote workers at meetings. Online collaboration tools such as Huddle and Slack keep folks more connected.

5. Make them a priority.

Try an easy test. Ask a few workers in various offices, “What are our core values?” If they can’t talk to them consistently, then they’re not memorable or clearly differentiated and thus not useful.

Values should be prominently displayed in public as well as employee-only locations, so go ahead and hang them up. But remember that cafeteria posters alone won’t cut it. Each region, each division, each office, each department should ask, “How do we live out these values?” Employees should internalize them and feel empowered by them. Because when you have values-driven decision-making, you can say to someone you manage in any office: “You don’t need to come to me on every decision; you can make a decision based on our company’s core values.”

Values can’t be presented one time. Employees need to know what they mean as part of their everyday work lives. Continue to communicate through speech and actions in an inspiring and interesting way so that workers understand the implications and begin to live them.

6. Ditch the annual review.

Let’s face it, annual performance reviews are broken—half of companies already know it and the other half won’t admit it. Why wait a year to provide important feedback? Rather, use mobile apps to stay connected with the workforce in the home office and afar. Ask workers questions on a range of topics and get feedback immediately. (See related article, “Pulse Surveys and Feedback: Addressing Employee Concerns in Real Time,” at carriermag.com/n5tsg.)

GE CEO Jeff Immelt recently talked about the company’s shift to real-time evaluations for workers around the globe. (See, for example, Aug. 4, 2016 LinkedIn post, “Why GE is giving up employee ratings, abandoning annual reviews and rethinking the role of HQ.”)

7. Hire right from the get-go.

Sure, that sounds obvious. But armed with a set of core values, the recruiting process suddenly gets more compelling, insightful and productive. The list of values should be item No. 1 when the conversation turns to “Do you want to hear about how we work here?”

ING Bank Founder Arkadi Kuhlmann is famous for this. “When I interview people,” he said at a conference last year, “I always ask: ‘What is your calling? What are you passionate about? What’s your cause?’ That’s where the energy is.”

Noting that the customers of ING (now owned by Capital One) were called “savers,” Kuhlmann said to prospective employees: “If you’re not a saver, you can’t work here.”

He went on to say, “If the people making the bread don’t eat the bread, they can’t live the brand. We wanted an alignment of personal values and brand values.”

8. It’s never going to be perfect.

Like human beings, cultures are living, breathing, evolving. The health of both shouldn’t be taken for granted. Both take care and feeding; both are a work in progress.

Thus, while your organization may have cultural differences among regional offices in the U.S.—and surely in multiple countries—the key is to be continuously driving toward an end goal of a healthy and consistent culture, realizing there will be some bumps in the road.

Schedule an upcoming phone call with core values on the agenda. It will be one of the most important calls you can make this year. If you manage core values well, they’ll manage the business well, regardless of where your workers fire up their laptops.