To kick off the current football season, Brigham Young University football coach Bronco Mendenhall made a bold move. In place of players' last names, he had the team's core values—tradition, spirit, and honor—emblazoned on the back of the team jerseys. The goal: “to make them very visible for anyone who wants to know about our program and what it stands for,” Mendenhall told reporters.

The move is part of a trend among organizations, including companies, to capture a set of core values, commit them to paper, and promote them throughout the organization. According to Wayne Brody, senior leader at governance consulting firm LRN and former chief compliance officer for Arrow Electronics, more companies are making a statement of core values or selecting a set of values—words like “integrity, community, and service” to use as guideposts to influence employee behavior.

While more companies are crafting a set of values, however, it doesn't mean they all are living by them. Few give their core values as much attention as Mendenhall gave to BYU's, experts say, and to their own disadvantage. “Well over 90 percent of publicly traded companies have core value statements, but they often have nothing to do with how management actually runs the business,” Brody says. Instead, they frequently belie a lack of thoughtfulness. One company, for example, claimed that safety was its top priority, but put it only sixth on a list when it came to getting those priorities down on paper.

At LRN, there's been an uptick in companies approaching the firm for help to think through their values, says Brody, particularly ones in the financial services industry that are grappling with ongoing violations in the face of tightening regulation. For other companies, the focus on the core values statement comes out of a larger effort to address rising governance topics like sustainability and human rights, says Erica Lasdon, a senior analyst with socially responsible investment firm Calvert Investments.

Value statements are also appearing in more detail in financial statements like 10-Ks than they were five or ten years ago. Companies like Whole Foods Market once included only a passing reference to core values in their corporate filings; since 2004, they list them out, detail the reasons for additions to the list—it has grown from five to eight—and describe how the company follows through on select ones.

At some level, broadcasting core values can create liabilities when trouble occurs. Claim that ethics is your number one priority, for example, and it may seem all the worse when an employee is indicted for bribery. Omit a trendy value, like environmentalism or collaboration, and a company is open to criticism. Add to that the various Dilbert comics that hilariously disparage the whole concept of core values, and it can be tempting to simply let whatever may be written stay buried.

Taking a proactive approach to values can actually enhance compliance. “Values are decision-making tools,” Brody says, as opposed to rules, which “are made to be broken” and can't cover every possible scenario an employee might encounter. “Without a system of values, rules don't matter.” Usually flanked by vision and mission statements on the more abstract side, along with a code of conduct that provides detailed behavioral expectations, core values statements can often be one of the most practical conceptual items a company creates.

Providing the Context

Nearly every meeting at DuPont starts with a reference to or example of one of the $35 billion chemical company's four core values: safety and health, environment, ethics, and people. Those mentions can be a formal presentation, with Powerpoint slides, or an impromptu anecdotal story from an employee about, say, avoiding a car accident on the way to work. Letha Hammon, corporate ethics and compliance officer for DuPont, recently began a conference call with a discussion of an employee article about how important it is to stay aware of unexpected dangers when doing routine tasks. “The purpose of our core values is to give everyone in the company the context in which we are supposed to do our work, no matter where in the company they work,” says Hammon. “If you met any DuPont employee they should be able to rattle off what those four core values are.”

Codifying and publishing a corporate list of values is also a good defensive measure. “Companies all have values; the real question is do they actually spend some time thoughtfully articulating them and making sure everything is aligned to promote those values, or do they get there by default,” says David de Wetter, a senior consultant with Towers Watson's talent management practice. One client, for example, held “collaboration and team work” as a corporate value, but had an extremely hierarchal organizational structure and awarded bonuses on individual performance only. “The reality didn't reflect the stated values, and not surprisingly, the company had a lot of turnover,” de Wetter says.

The tradition of core values goes back at least 70 years, and likely longer. Johnson & Johnson's “Credo Values” were written in 1943, just before the company went public. They contain no bullet points, but rather fluid prose that sets out the pharmaceutical company's responsibility to customers, suppliers, employees, communities, and stockholders, in that order. Dupont, founded in 1802, has one of the oldest sets of corporate values, though Hammon says they weren't formally packaged as four core values until the late 1980s. Other companies with enduring values include Procter & Gamble, and flooring company Armstrong. According to its Website, Armstrong codified its operating principles including fairness to customers in 1960, following the tenets its founder laid out when he started the company a century earlier.

“And a Little Weirdness”

There are many similarities among the values statements, and buzzwords like “integrity,” “environment,” “people,” and “safety” show up frequently. Those words can often cluster by industry, notes Brody, with innovation taking precedence over tradition at technology companies, and personal responsibility rising to the top of the list at financial services firms. One of the most quirky statements comes from online shoe company Zappos, now owned by Amazon, which explicitly defined its values to maintain its culture as it grew. Its 10 “Family Core Values” include: “Create fun and a little weirdness”; “Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded”; and “Be humble.”

While it's not necessary to be as edgy as Zappos, it is important for a company to avoid boilerplate language. “If it's a generic statement, it has very little value,” says Jim Gregory, CEO of CoreBrand, a branding consultancy. “You have to do the hard work of defining what a company stands for.” In fact, Amazon, along with some other large companies such as Wal-Mart, Apple, and Google, takes an unorthodox approach to expressing core values. Rather than a list, Amazon publishes its mission and in its annual report, reprints a 1997 letter to shareholders from CEO and founder Jeff Bezos laying out purpose and values like “It's All About the Long Term,” and “Obsess Over Customers.” Google, on the other hand, maintains a detailed list of “10 Things We Know to Be True,” with such nuggets as “You can make money without doing evil,” and “Fast is better than slow.”

Making values accessible and relevant for employees is always a challenge, no matter how artfully written they are. To that end, there is some debate around what number of values is optimal. “The more you have, the less value they have,” says Gregory, and “if you can refine it into a sentence or two, that's better than five or ten bullet points.” Still, he says Whole Foods' expansion of their list to eight items shows it's a topic they're paying attention to, and isn't necessarily a negative.

According to Hammon, DuPont's four bullet points work well, offering a list that is both “short and sweet,” but also with enough latitude to expand on different themes within each category. To keep them fresh, the company recently rephrased its goal of zero violations to elicit a greater sense of personal commitment from employees and had some workers fill out cards with actions they would take to help minimize the chance of ethics problems.

One step consultants don't recommend that companies often take is changing their values. “We're not talking about this quarter, we're talking about the major arc of time,” says de Wetter. That means only a serious need to reboot should drive major overhauls. It was a stock price drop and significant layoffs, for example, that prompted then-CEO Kevin Rollins to sketch out “the soul of Dell” in the early 2000s. At BP, company leaders completely rewrote the set of values after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and Gulf oil spill in 2010. They struck the oil company's commitment to be “progressive, responsible, innovative, and performance-driven,” according to archives of the company's Website prior to the spill, and started a new list that began, not surprisingly, with “safety.”

No matter how much work a company puts into its statement of core values, however, words can go only go so far. Such statements of value “can help in an intangible way” when choosing whether or not to invest in a company, says Calvert Investment's Lasdon, “but it's not the primary thing we're going to take into account.”