Most companies have values and many invest vast resources into them. Far fewer have teams that remember those values or make key decisions based on them.
Why values rarely survive the slide deck
When organizations want to reinforce their culture, the instinct is usually to communicate more clearly. They lean into better messaging, a stronger internal launch and values refreshed and reposted in every corner of the office, Teams or Slack.
These aren’t bad choices. But in our experience, they rarely move the needle on their own.
The reason is simple: values aren’t just an information problem, they’re a memory problem. And you can’t solve a memory problem with better communication.
Consider that according to Fond (cited by Harvard Business School), only 1 in 10 HR leadersbelieve most of their employees can recite the company’s core values. And if people can’t recall the values, they certainly aren’t using them to guide decisions.
What the data shows
McKinsey’s 2023 research across 1,800 companies in 15 countries found that organizations investing seriously in their people and culture are 4.2 times more likely to outperform peers financially, with around 30 percent higher revenue growth and attrition rates almost five percentage points lower.
The common thread isn’t a better set of values. It’s a culture where those values are genuinely understood and lived.
Values on a wall and values embedded in shared memory are not the same thing.
What actually makes values stick
We’d argue that what actually works is shared experience – specifically the kind that engages people emotionally rather than just rationally.
When people create something together, interpret something together, or struggle toward something together, the experience gets encoded differently. It becomes a reference point. A story. Something they were part of rather than something that happened to them.
This is where the neuroscience gets interesting. Experiences that combine emotion, participation and shared achievement activate memory in a way that passive communication simply cannot replicate. The brain doesn’t just store the information: it stores the feeling, the context, and the people who were there.
Music is one of the most powerful vehicles for this. And of course, we realise we might be biased. But when you’ve seen a room of sceptical executives become genuinely moved by something they created together, it’s hard to argue with.
Harvard Medical School’s research on music and the brain helps explain it. Music activates memory, emotion, movement and the brain’s reward system at the same time, and very few human experiences engage that many systems at once.
Which is why a song your team helped write will outlast any values poster, any all-hands presentation, any internal campaign. Not because it’s more creative, but because of how the brain actually works.
The organizations that understand this aren’t looking for a better communication campaign. They’re looking for behaviour change, belonging, and experiences that build genuine community. Those things don’t come from a slide deck. They come from shared moments people are still talking about weeks later.
We’ve watched this play out across 21 years of working with global organizations. Companies who understand their competitive edge is based on culture and profit – are seeking behavior change, community and building belonging, not a sticking plaster.
And the neuroscience of music and memory is often the overlooked tool that can help them.
A question worth sitting with
What percentage of your team could recite your company values right now, and what percentage do you believe genuinely embodies them in their day-to-day work?
Because if values aren’t remembered, discussed and used to shape everyday decisions, it’s worth asking whether they’re delivering the cultural impact they were intended to.
