Do You Need a Culture and Values Officer? Find Out How This Position Is Critical To One Organization’s Success

At Disney Institute, we’re often asked about our advisory services work, and the impacts we’ve made on the many organizations we’ve engaged with over the years. Our clients have shared lots of great feedback about this work, but this might be one of the most unique and compelling examples of how we helped create positive change for another organization...

Commonwealth Credit Union in Frankfort, Kentucky has created a unique position known as a culture and values officer. The position is exclusively dedicated to sustaining the hard work and cultural changes that were implemented as part of their team’s collaboration with Disney Institute. 

Serving as the culture and values officer, Travis Flora has one key responsibility: to champion and maintain the organization’s new culture—a way of working—which now permeates all levels of the organization. To help the team bring its unique culture to life and engage employees in their roles, he intentionally focuses on four key areas identified by Disney Institute: employee selection, training, communication and care. 

Flora recently talked about his newly formed role and how he consistently reinforces the Disney Institute lessons among his colleagues as part of his daily responsibilities. If you’re wondering what a culture and values officer does every day, take a look at his job description.

Is Flora’s role making an impact? You bet! In addition to ongoing employee survey data and feedback that indicate positive results, Commonwealth Credit Union was recently named one of the top companies on the 15th Annual Best Places to Work in Kentucky list. Read more about how our Disney Institute team worked side-by-side with their organization to create a dramatic transformation in this case study.   

This got me thinking. If Commonwealth Credit Union has found such great success in having a dedicated culture and values officer to help define and sustain their employee experience, should other organizations consider having one too? In short, my answer is yes!

Now, not every company may have the necessary resources or staffing to have a dedicated role to reinforce its culture and values, but it is possible to place focus on these key processes—employee selection, training, communication and care—and find ways to reinforce the consistent behaviors that define culture. It’s a matter of making these critical elements of employee engagement a priority.

At Disney Institute, in our work training business leaders and professionals around the world, we often share this key insight:

By emphasizing certain critical human resources processes, you can create highly engaged employees who will more consistently deliver desired behaviors.

Because workplace culture and employee engagement have direct and lasting impacts on business results, this is one area where business leaders must be intentional. At Disney, our consistent business results are driven by strategically focusing on these areas, and they are a key source of what differentiates us.

Think about it: As a leader, what is one thing that you can start doing tomorrow to be more intentional about improving employee engagement on your team? Share your ideas below.

(This content originally appeared on the Disney Institute Blog.)

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