Off the top of your head, can you honestly name your company’s values? Assuming you can, do they feel truly aligned to your workplace? If you hesitated with either question, you're not alone, and that's the problem.
Your company values shouldn't exist solely on your homepage or in a handbook that gets read once during onboarding. They should exist in the everyday: showing up in how you recognize your team, how you engage with your colleagues and clients during meetings, in the tiny moments that shape your culture.
Since refreshing BAM's values in January 2025 — Impeccable Communication, Total Accountability, Serve to Succeed, Be Resilient, and Freedom to Thrive — we've been intentional about finding small but meaningful ways to keep them front and center.Why? Well, posting values on a wall doesn't make them real. Living them does. Two practices have made a big impact:
The Monthly BAMF Award: Celebrating Values in Action
Each month before our company-wide BAM meeting, we highlight one value and invite everyone to nominate a teammate (a “BAMf”) who demonstrated this value best. Team members submit 1-2 sentence nominations explaining how the person they nominated embodied that month's value.
Whether it’s a BAMf who went above and beyond for a client (Serve to Succeed) or someone who leaned into an difficult moment with openness (Be Resilient) — it's about noticing the small acts of leadership, generosity, and intentionality that happen behind the scenes. The winner gets a $100 gift card, but more importantly, they get recognition from the team for showing what “living BAM values” looks like.
Meetings with Meaning (and Music)
During weekly standups, Ramel (BAM's Senior Community Manager) kicks off with music. As we wait for everyone to join (the joys of remote work), a song plays for about a minute. Then Ramel drops the track details and shares which BAM value it represents and why — all in a few seconds.
That's it. Simple, fast, and memorable.
What started as a way to make Zoom meetings less sterile has become a chance to see our values reflected in spaces beyond work. Music connects us in ways bullet points never could. Because we've been doing this since updating our values in January, those five core values are becoming second nature at work.
Plus, we get to share music. (Never underestimate the power of a good playlist to build culture, seriously).
Small Practices, Big Impact
Neither of these practices requires a budget (well, except for the gift cards). Neither takes more than a few minutes. But together, they transform abstract values into a shared understanding of how we want to show up at work.
Your values are only as strong as your commitment to living them out loud. Our advice? Find the small practices that work for your team: ones that make your values impossible to ignore.
Culture isn't built in decks or a homepage. And it's not solely built during your annual offsite. It's built in the everyday moments when you pause to say: This. This is who we are.
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