Company Values Examples: A Founder’s Guide to Accountability in the UK & Ireland (2026)

Most owners can tell you their company values off the top of their head, or at least point to where they’re written down. There’s a page on the website, maybe a line on the wall in reception. And yet if you followed that same owner through a normal week, watching the calls and the hiring decisions, you’d struggle to spot those values doing any actual work. That’s the gap this piece is about. Real company values examples are useful, but the harder question is what turns a word on a wall into how your people behave when you’re not in the room.

I work with established owners across the UK and Ireland, and this comes up more than you’d think. The values themselves are rarely the problem. Nobody is held to them.

Why values usually end up as wallpaper

Here’s the pattern I see. An owner goes away for a day and comes back with four or five words. Integrity. Excellence. Teamwork. Everyone nods, it gets typed up nicely, and that’s more or less the end of it.

The trouble isn’t that those words are wrong. It’s that they’re so broad they ask nothing of anyone. Nobody comes out of a values session aiming for dishonesty and mediocrity. If a value can’t be argued against, it can’t guide a decision either. It just sits there agreeing with everybody.

And because nothing follows, nothing changes. The value never gets referenced in a difficult conversation, never tips a decision either way. Within a few months the whole exercise feels like something you did once, not something you run the business by.

Company values examples that actually mean something

The difference between a dead value and a live one usually comes down to whether it’s specific enough to cost you something. A good value rules certain behaviours in and others out. Here are the kinds of examples I’d point an owner towards.

• We tell the client the truth early, even when it’s bad news. Not “honesty” in the abstract, but a rule about the awkward phone call you’d rather delay. Everyone knows the temptation is to wait and hope.
• We do fewer things properly rather than more things badly. This is “excellence” made real. It gives someone permission to say no, and it makes overpromising a values breach rather than just enthusiasm.
• We fix the problem, then work out whose fault it was. A concrete take on ownership. It tells people what order to do things in when something goes wrong, which is exactly when values are tested.
• We turn up prepared or we don’t turn up. Respect for other people’s time, stated plainly. You can hold someone to this in a way you can’t hold them to “professionalism”.
• We’d rather lose the deal than win it the wrong way. The value that only counts when it costs you money. Everyone claims it; very few can point to a time they actually walked away.

Notice that none of these are grand. They’re closer to house rules than mission statements, and that’s deliberate. A value you can picture someone breaking on a Tuesday afternoon is one you can manage.

Turning a value into everyday behaviour

Once you’ve got wording that means something, the real work starts, and it’s not glamorous. A value becomes real through repetition in small, specific moments, not through a launch. Take “we tell the client the truth early”. When someone on your team makes the uncomfortable call instead of hiding, you have to notice it out loud. When someone buries a problem and it blows up later, you have to name the value they walked past, calmly, as a fact rather than a telling-off. And you have to do it yourself when it’s your turn. People don’t listen to what you framed on the wall; they copy what you do under pressure.

The same goes for hiring and firing, which is where values get their sharpest test. If you say you value doing fewer things properly, but you keep the person who is brilliant at winning work and hopeless at delivering it, your team has just learned what you actually value. They’re not reading the poster; they’re watching who gets kept.

Where values earn their keep: the hard decisions

Values are supposed to make hard decisions easier, and this is the part most owners never reach, because the values were too vague to help. Think about the last genuinely difficult call you had to make. A big client who treats your staff badly. A profitable line of work that sits slightly outside what you’re proud of. In each case there’s a version of you that does the comfortable thing and a version that does the right thing, and the values are meant to tip you towards the second.

But they only do that if you put the decision next to them, and that’s a habit most owners don’t have. The value about losing the deal rather than winning it the wrong way is worthless the moment a tempting deal appears, unless you stop and hold it up against the words. Skip that and it gets quietly overruled by whatever’s easiest that week.

What actually keeps them alive

Here’s the honest bit. Writing better values is the easy part. Living them week after week, when you’re busy and tired and the comfortable option is right there, is the hard part. That’s where things fall down, not because owners don’t care, but because nothing in a normal week forces the question.

The businesses that actually run on their values have some kind of regular checkpoint. It needn’t be elaborate: a recurring moment, weekly or fortnightly, where someone asks the plain question. Did our decisions this week match what we say we’re about, and if not, what are we doing about it. That small act of looking back, out loud, on a schedule, is what stops values drifting into wallpaper. You can do it on your own if you’re disciplined, but most owners aren’t, and the values review is never the loudest thing in the diary. So it slips.

The bottom line

Good company values examples aren’t the ones that sound impressive. They’re specific enough to change a real decision, close enough to the ground that you can catch someone living or breaking them in an ordinary week. Get the wording concrete, then be honest that wording changes nothing on its own. What changes things is coming back to them on a regular rhythm, and holding yourself and your people to the answer.

That last part, the coming back and being held to it, quietly decides whether any of this sticks. It’s also the bit owners find hardest to do alone, and it’s a good deal of what I help owners with: a simple weekly structure that keeps the things you’ve decided matter from slipping off the edge of a busy week.