Engagement and Recognition
31 Employee Recognition Awards That Actually Drive Engagement in 2026
A practical guide to employee recognition awards with 31 ideas, best practices, and common mistakes to avoid.
Jonathan Fields
February 10, 2026
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See 25 real company values examples and learn how to define your own core values that drive culture and performance.
According to Gallup, only 27% of employees strongly believe in their company’s values, and just 23% say they can apply those values in their daily work.
That means three out of four employees don’t see their company living the values it promotes.
Why does this gap exist?
Because for many businesses, company core values are declared, not demonstrated. Leaders define them once and move on. But values are meant to guide actions, influence decisions, and build consistency across every level of the business.
When company values are authentic and lived daily, they become the foundation for trust, alignment, and long-term success.
Before we explore real core value examples, let’s take a moment to understand what company values truly mean and why they matter so much.
Company core values are the shared beliefs and expected behaviors that define how your team makes decisions, treats each other, and serves customers. They describe what “doing the right thing” looks like inside your organization even when no one’s watching.
Strong business core values remind employees what matters most beyond profit. They shape how teams collaborate, how leaders communicate, and how customers experience your brand. When values are clear, people feel aligned, trusted, and part of something bigger than their job title.
In simple terms:
These values influence everything from hiring and onboarding to recognition and decision-making. They create consistency across teams and help build a culture where people know what’s expected and why it matters.
With employee recognition tools like Assembly, you can make your values visible every day by recognizing people who live them, tracking engagement, and keeping your culture strong. For teams evaluating different platforms, see our guide to the top employee recognition software of 2026 to find the right fit for reinforcing your values.
The best organizations don’t just talk about their values, but they live them daily. Your company’s core values define how people show up, make decisions, and treat one another.
Here’s a list of 25 examples of core values in the workplace to help you define your own.
Integrity means doing the right thing even when no one’s watching. It’s the standard that keeps promises credible, communications honest, and leadership consistent. When integrity is lived, trust becomes your competitive edge.
Innovation as a core value invites employees to challenge the status quo. It encourages experimentation, learning from failure, and seeking smarter ways to deliver value. This mindset keeps your business adaptable in a constantly shifting market.
Accountability ensures everyone owns both results and mistakes. It creates clarity between roles, drives follow-through, and builds a culture where people take pride in delivering on commitments.
Empathy helps teams see beyond tasks to people. As a core value, it encourages leaders to listen actively, design processes with people in mind, and create psychological safety that fuels belonging and retention.
Teamwork turns shared goals into shared wins. In practice, it means open communication, mutual respect, and celebrating contributions across departments.
Transparency means communicating openly about goals, challenges, and outcomes in the organisation. It creates accountability and eliminates silos, ensuring everyone understands how decisions are made and how success is measured.
Open communication from leaders about wins and setbacks helps eliminate rumors and turns uncertainty into alignment.
Respect builds the foundation for trust and collaboration. As a company value, it means treating every opinion as valuable, honoring diverse experiences, and setting clear boundaries that support healthy communication.
Customer obsession means placing customer needs at the center of every decision. It encourages teams to listen deeply, act quickly, and constantly refine products or services to deliver meaningful impact.
Gratitude as a company value means recognizing effort, not just outcomes. It’s about leaders and peers showing appreciation for contributions big and small in real time. When gratitude becomes part of daily culture, it boosts morale, strengthens relationships, and turns employee recognition into a shared habit that drives long-term engagement.
Organizations looking to make gratitude more systematic can explore inexpensive employee engagement ideas that complement recognition software, or plan appreciation moments using an employee engagement calendar 2026 to maintain consistent visibility throughout the year."
Create a culture where every voice matters and every background is valued. Inclusion fuels innovation, strengthens morale, and ensures people feel proud of where they work.
You can embed inclusion by weaving respect and equal opportunity into every meeting, decision, and recognition moment for every employee.
Continuous learning drives adaptability. It encourages employees to seek growth, learn from mistakes, and share insights openly. Companies that live this value build resilience and stay future-ready.
Courage in the workplace means speaking up, taking calculated risks, and challenging outdated norms. It empowers employees to innovate and helps leaders model transparency when navigating uncertainty.
Adaptability reflects a company’s ability to stay steady through change. It encourages teams to pivot quickly, embrace new tools, and view shifting priorities as opportunities to evolve rather than obstacles.
Ownership means helping employees feel like true team members, not just staff. When this core value takes root, everyone begins acting like a business partner rather than a participant. It builds accountability, encourages proactive problem-solving, and empowers people to take initiative instead of waiting for direction.
Ownership starts from day one. Learn how to welcome a new hire in ways that demonstrate your values immediately and set the tone for their entire journey with your organization."
Excellence means pursuing mastery in every detail to create lasting impact. For companies, excellence represents high standards, continuous improvement, and pride in execution.
It’s about setting clear standards, celebrating craftsmanship, and continuously improving processes so the company never stops striving for better.
Resilience is the ability to recover, adapt, and keep moving forward after setbacks. It helps teams stay focused under pressure and strengthens morale in fast-changing markets. Companies that value resilience create stability without sacrificing speed.
Collaboration thrives when teams work toward shared goals rather than individual wins. It’s about communicating openly, breaking down silos, and respecting diverse expertise. Companies that live this value create alignment and efficiency without sacrificing creativity.
A growth mindset turns challenges into opportunities to learn. It encourages experimentation, feedback, and resilience. When leaders model this value, employees become more adaptable and confident in tackling new goals.
Growth mindset thrives in environments where development is recognized. Discover why mentorship fails without recognition and how to build feedback loops that reinforce learning as a core organizational value.
Sustainability reflects a company’s commitment to long-term impact. It means making conscious decisions about resources, partnerships, and processes that protect both people and the planet for future generations.
Agility as a core value keeps organizations fast, flexible, and responsive to change. It’s about adapting quickly, learning fast, and empowering teams to make decisions without bureaucracy slowing them down.
Health as a company value goes beyond wellness programs. It’s about designing work that supports physical, mental, and emotional energy. Companies that prioritize health create sustainable performance and reduce burnout.
Happiness at work isn’t about perks but about purpose. It means ensuring people feel valued, supported, and recognized for meaningful contributions. When happiness is a priority, creativity and loyalty naturally increase.
Loyalty means mutual commitment between the company and employee. It’s earned through fairness, respect, and recognition. Loyal teams show up, stay engaged, and advocate for the company’s mission even through change.
Compassion brings humanity into leadership. It means caring about people’s experiences and supporting them through challenges. Companies that lead with compassion create loyalty, lower turnover, and healthier workplace relationships.
Creativity drives innovation and differentiation. It means encourage people to think freely, test bold ideas, and collaborate without fear of failure. When companies make creativity a core value, they turn imagination into a strategic advantage.
Different industries prioritize different values based on their unique challenges, customer expectations, and competitive landscapes. Here's how core values typically show up across sectors:
Common values: Innovation, speed, transparency, user focus, impact
Why these matter: Tech moves fast and companies need values that encourage experimentation, rapid iteration, and staying ahead of change.
Examples:
Common values: Compassion, integrity, excellence in care, safety, collaboration
Why these matter: Healthcare directly impacts lives. Values emphasize patient wellbeing, ethical decision-making, and clinical excellence.
Examples:
Common values: Integrity, trust, client focus, accountability, prudent risk management
Why these matter: Financial services require trust. Values emphasize ethical behavior, fiduciary responsibility, and long-term thinking.
Examples:
How they're reinforced: Compliance programs, fiduciary standards, client satisfaction metrics, ethics committees
Common values: Customer service, teamwork, respect, excellence
Why these matter: Success depends on customer experience and frontline employee engagement. Values emphasize service quality and team culture.
Examples:
How they're reinforced: Customer satisfaction scores, employee empowerment to solve problems, recognition for exceptional service
Common values: Safety, quality, continuous improvement, teamwork, accountability
Why these matter: Physical work environments demand safety focus. Efficiency and quality directly impact competitiveness.
Examples:
Common values: Excellence, integrity, collaboration, client focus, development
Why these matter: Knowledge workers are the product. Values emphasize expertise, ethical behavior, and people development.
Examples:
These five global brands demonstrate how clear principles can shape culture, drive innovation, and sustain trust at scale.
Google’s company philosophy shows how innovation flourishes when decisions start with empathy for the user. Their structure encourages creativity, autonomy, and bold problem-solving values that any growing business can model.
Google’s Core Values Examples
Patagonia’s core values prove that purpose and profitability can coexist. The company’s authenticity and environmental stance strengthen both brand loyalty and internal alignment.
Patagonia company values examples
Amazon’s leadership principles emphasize long-term thinking and customer focus. Their “ownership” mindset empowers employees to act like business owners, driving accountability, speed, and innovation across teams.
Amazon company Values (Leadership Principles)
Meta’s company values reflect a bold culture built around speed, innovation, and transparency. Their direct communication principle helps teams align quickly in a fast-evolving industry.
Meta Business Values
Microsoft’s core values highlight how ethics and performance go hand in hand. The company’s culture reinforces integrity and curiosity as the foundation for innovation and growth.
Microsoft Values
Core values shape how your team makes decisions, treats each other, and shows up for customers. But most companies get them wrong by choosing values that sound good in theory but don't guide behavior in practice.
Here's how to define core values that actually matter.
Core values can't be created in a vacuum by leadership alone. They need to reflect the people who actually do the work.
Form a cross-functional working group that includes employees at different levels, departments, and tenures. Include both long-time team members who understand your history and newer employees who bring fresh perspective.
Run small group discussions or surveys asking these questions:
These conversations reveal what already drives your culture or what's missing that people wish existed.
Look for consistency between what people say and what actually happens.
Review recent decisions your company has made both easy ones and difficult ones. What principles guided those choices? When you've had to choose between profit and principle, customer demands and employee wellbeing, or speed and quality, what did you prioritize?
The values that show up repeatedly in these moments are likely already core to how you operate whether you've named them or not.
Vague values like "excellence" or "teamwork" mean nothing because they could apply to any company.
Turn abstract concepts into concrete behaviors. Instead of "innovation," define what innovation looks like in your context: "We test ideas quickly and learn from failure" or "We question assumptions before accepting them."
For each potential value, complete this sentence: "We live this value when we..." If you can't describe specific behaviors, the value isn't clear enough.
Research shows companies with 4-7 clearly defined values see significantly higher employee alignment than those with long lists. Choose the values that most distinctly represent your culture, not every positive quality you admire.
Action: Force-rank your list. Cut anything that's "nice to have" rather than "defines who we are."
Values only matter when they're difficult to uphold.
Test potential values against real scenarios: Would you turn down a profitable client who violated this value? Would you promote someone who hits numbers but undermines this value? If the answer is "maybe" or "it depends," the value isn't core.
Action: Review the last 3-5 difficult company decisions. Do your proposed values explain those choices? Would they guide future hard calls?
Don't assume everyone interprets values the same way.
For each value, create a simple framework showing what it looks like in action. What behaviors demonstrate this value? What behaviors violate it? Give real examples from your organization.
Create a one-page guide for each value with 3-4 examples of the value in practice and 2-3 examples of what violates it.
Values without reinforcement become wall art.
The most effective way to embed values is recognizing employees who demonstrate them. When someone lives a value, acknowledge it immediately and publicly. This shows everyone what "living our values" actually looks like day-to-day.
Integrate values into your recognition program. Use Assembly to tie every recognition moment to specific values, creating a continuous feedback loop that reinforces what matters.
Core values aren't a one-time exercise. They evolve as your company grows, but the fundamental that drives how you work should remain consistent. Review them annually, but change them rarely.
Defining your company values is only the first step. The real impact comes when you live them through every decision you make, every conversation you have, and every recognition you give.
When you lead by example, your team follows. They start showing up with the same energy, trust, and accountability you model. These principles shape the kind of company people want to join and stay with.
You can use Assembly to make that easier. Recognize people who live your core values, celebrate the right behaviors, and track how your culture strengthens over time. Over time, you’ll see your values transform from a written list into daily habits that strengthen your culture.
If you’re ready to build a workplace where values drive action, not just aspiration start with Assembly today.
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