Verizon’s new ‘cultural operating system’ uses 3 core values to drive employee performance

For companies, rebranding can be skin-deep. Verizon took it further—in ways that help drive employee performance.

The telecom giant recently did a refresh that includes a new purpose statement: “We power and empower how people live, work, and play.”

Verizon also created a “cultural operating system” called Culture OS, says executive VP and chief human resources officer Sam Hammock. Its three core values: trust, care, and excellence.

That purpose and those values apply to Verizon’s customers as well as its 110,000 employees, Hammock says. Take care, for example. “I talk a lot about the intersection of CX and EX,” Hammock tells me from Verizon’s HQ in Basking Ridge, N.J. “If you’re really caring for and delivering a great employee experience, your employees will care for your customers.”

And trust? “Trust is everything,” Hammock says. Embedding it in a company’s culture calls for transparency, she adds. “Trust, for me, is one of the biggest ways that you drive performance, that you drive empowerment in your employee base, and that you create loyalty.”

Then there’s excellence, which for Verizon employees is all about performance. Supporting and measuring that performance goes well beyond the year-end review or the midyear check-in, Hammock stresses.

“The thing that we’re really leveraged around is making sure that every day there’s excellence,” she says. “The more that we can empower people—whether it's decision-making, the ability and ways to drive change, [or] innovation in their own work—that’s going to drive better performance.”

With that in mind, every people leader in the company can take an eight-month program that includes “leadership hygiene” around things like staff meetings, weekly one-on-ones, and revisiting goals and development plans. The program also covers how to manage and care for your team, navigate challenging conversations, and promote employee well-being.

“It’s not just yours as an employee to own your own development plan,” Hammock notes. “Your leader needs to be playing an active role in that as well, to serve up those opportunities and then how they’re held accountable for their employees’ and team’s success.”

Via Verizon’s human capital management system, all team members have access to a “two-by-two” feedback tool. “We want people to be using this real-time as an employee,” Hammock says. “You can…request feedback on a certain presentation, a certain project, to whoever your cohort was, whether it’s a peer [or] a leader.”

Speaking of leaders, building new ones is also a priority.

Since 2011, the Verizon Leadership Development Program (VLDP) has taken in a select group of recent college graduates. In this full-time, multiyear program, participants do short stints in three areas of the business. “They end up accelerating careers at a promotion rate faster than anyone else in the company,” Hammock says.

This year, for VLDP members, Verizon created a new shadow board. Twelve applicants were chosen to spend a year as “reverse mentors” to CEO Hans Vestberg and the rest of the executive team, while also collaborating on several projects that include a capstone effort. “They’re solving really complex business issues for us and trying to get to the bottom of it with a really fresh lens,” says Hammock, who expects the shadow board to continue.

When it comes to performance, Hammock warns against getting too hung up on metrics. “You could make some really wrong calls when you focus on just the numbers,” she says. “If you’re constantly rewarding for results, you could reward the wrong behavior.”

To avoid that pitfall, Verizon changed its performance measurement system last year so numbers and goals account for just 50%; six leadership behaviors account for the rest.

“Yes, we want you to deliver those numbers,” Hammock says. “But equally important is we care how you do it.” The six behaviors: Be customer-centric, deliver innovation, activate teamwork, embrace diversity, model integrity, and champion growth.

You can’t phone that stuff in.

Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com