Company values should serve as tools to guide decisions, solve tradeoffs, and define what winning looks like. But over time, those values can become static while the business keeps evolving. At some point, every leadership team has to ask: Do our values still reflect how we show up today and the culture we want for the future? 

At SurveyMonkey, we hit that moment as we emerged from the pandemic into a fundamentally different world of work. Our business and our teams had changed, and we needed our values to catch up. We weren't looking for a slogan swap—we were looking for values that truly anchored us.

So we leaned into what we do best: we listened.

Our data-driven framework to determine company values

Watch our Chief People Officer, Becky Cantieri, break down how we built values that actually align our teams.

Round 1: Turning corporate values into a decision-making system

We took inspiration from a Harvard Business Review article by professor and author Erin Meyer, who argues that corporate values only matter when they help teams navigate tradeoffs—moments where there’s no clear right answer, just competing priorities.

That insight shaped our approach. 

Instead of defining our values in a closed conference room, we built a structured listening program across the organization to understand how decisions actually get made.

We started with leadership, and sent out surveys built around real-world dilemmas directors, senior directors, and VPs face every day. It included questions like:

For each scenario, leaders answered:

None of the scenarios included “bad” options. They were all defensible choices, but represented a fork in the road. Going left would lead us to one type of culture, while going right would lead us to another.

The goal of the survey wasn’t only to check alignment, but also to uncover the gap between intention and reality. We needed to listen carefully and establish a baseline for future conversations about how our culture actually operates.

Round 2: What the data revealed

With 83% participation, the signals were clear, and at times…uncomfortable.

Across the board, we saw a pattern: a gap between what leaders believed we should do and what we actually did in practice.

"These kinds of insights rarely surface through informal feedback,” said Becky Cantieri, Chief People Officer at SurveyMonkey. “We make ongoing employee feedback a critical part of how we run our business, invest our resources, and build a culture we are all proud to be part of.  Dedicated surveys on cultural alignment can help you dive deep when it really matters."

That clarity helped us refine our values during the drafting process, so they’d better match the culture we wanted to build. 

For example, an early idea for one value was “Expect to win.” While it captured our ambition, leaders felt it sounded too individualistic and didn’t reflect how progress happens across teams. Based on the feedback, we pivoted to “Win together,” a subtle change that reinforced the collaboration we needed to scale.

Round 3: Turning insights into action and continuously listening

Instead of locking in new values and hitting “publish,” we kept listening.

We wanted to understand whether these updates held up in practice, especially for the people responsible for turning values into everyday behavior: managers.

Managers are the link between company values and how work actually gets done. To get their take, we decided to pressure-test our drafts the same way we’d test a new feature, using our own platform to run iterative concept testing on different versions of the language.

The feedback also pushed us further. Managers didn’t just want to know what the values were, they wanted to know how to use them when priorities conflict. They asked for practical examples to guide real decision-making moments. That feedback led us to iterate again.

Final round: Bringing our core values to life

Guided by these insights, we brought updated drafts into manager focus groups, using their feedback to pressure-test the language in real-world contexts. With each round, we refined and iterated until the values felt authentic to how our teams actually work.

As a result, our updated values better reflected the team we aspire to be:

The impact of continuous listening

By the time we ran our annual org health survey, the impact of this approach was clear: agreement with the statement “Our company values reflect our culture” increased by 23 points.

But the bigger shift was how we embedded listening into how our culture operates day to day.

To keep our momentum going, we introduced an always-on “Living Our Values” survey, where employees can recognize peers who embody our values in action. We also built this into how we celebrate wins. When someone recognizes a teammate, they tie that recognition directly to a company value, reinforcing what those values look like in practice.

It’s a simple system, and an important way to keep values visible, relevant, and continuously reinforced long after the initial rollout.

“Culture is like a living, breathing organism that requires time, attention, and nurturing. Listening is a vital part of that nurturing. When our values are informed by honest feedback from our teams, they become practical tools for how we operate together–and they start to actually mean something to everyone.”

The lesson for leaders

Culture isn’t something you define once. It’s something you need to continuously keep tabs on.

When you do that, you catch misalignment earlier. You stop guessing what your culture is or should be, and confidently know what it needs to be. 

To help other teams do this, we’ve built curated employee engagement programs. These ongoing listening workflows connect feedback across touchpoints to help HR leaders measure and improve culture and team performance. Examples include: 

Instead of starting from scratch, SurveyMonkey programs let you get started with an employee engagement program instantly, taking the guesswork out of deciding what to ask and when to ask it.