Why Living Your Core Values Prevents Professional Burnout

How do company values impact employee retention?

When employees feel their organization actively embodies its stated values, they have significantly higher engagement scores and are 23% more likely to stay long-term. To prevent burnout in high-stress service industries, professionals must ensure their personal values explicitly align with their employer's boundaries and expectations.

We can safely say the well-being of the PR professional has been a volatile experience since March 2020. After three years of evolving relationships between employees and employers, it’s time to focus on strategies centering on stability. My 2023 call to action for you is to define, communicate, and live your values to ensure your well-being is front and center. Values are “the fundamental beliefs that guide and motivate our behavior and choices of what is important in life.” Brand-new employee experience data from Qualtrics says, “When employees feel their organization embodies these values, they’re 27% more likely to have higher engagement scores, and 23% more likely to stay working for more than three years.” The more your employees understand and embrace their values, the better they will perform for you. And the better they perform for you, the more money your company will make. Additional data from the same Qualtrics report says, “Globally, 63% of those who rate their work-life balance highly are willing to go above and beyond for their organizations.” Public relations is a service industry. It can sometimes require the beyond 9-5 Monday-Friday experience. However, we must set boundaries as the DEFAULT rather than the EXCEPTION. I encourage every public relations professional to spend this month doing the following: 1. Understand the values of your employer. Ask your manager or other leaders how they identify with or live those values. If you run your own company, review and refresh your values. 2. Understand how your personal values align with your company’s values. You should avoid working at companies whose values interfere with what is important to you! 3. Identify three things for your well-being to focus on this year in alignment with those values. Examples include hiring a financial planner, volunteering for a professional association, or blocking an hour out of every day for exercise. 4. Assess how your company’s values are consistently and strategically communicated at your workplace. For example, include them at the top of every internal meeting agenda, or reference them when praising others (directs, peers, and bosses) for outstanding work and how they tie to those values. 5. Encourage your employees to share examples of how they used your company’s values to improve their well-being. For instance: Chasing the Sun’s values are respect for time, transparency, and professionalism. If a Chasing the Sun employee told me this month they preplanned their entire 2023 paid time off schedule (as I used to do during my career), I might give them a spot bonus for prioritizing their well-being. Let’s look to 2023 as an empowering force for us to focus on living our values. Because when that happens, we can truly advance the PR profession and you as a world-class professional. I look forward to following along on your respective journeys.