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

IN OTHER NEWS

Unequal measures
Who can blame racially diverse corporate directors for losing trust in DEI? Between 2022 and 2023, the share of new nonwhite directors dropped from 45% to 36%, Azure Gilman reports. Sure, DEI remains high on board agendas, but talk is cheap. In a survey of Black and Latino Fortune 500 board members, respondents who believe their company is investing in race equity and diversity efforts fell 7% last year compared to 2021. Include me among the dismayed.

Ghost world
For some folks seeking work, it’s getting tough to trust that a job posting is real. In consulting over the past two years, “ghost jobs”—which don’t result in a hire—have climbed from 26% to 31% of listings. This sign of a shaky white-collar economy is a new twist for the consulting business, where top talent has long had its pick of positions. To add insult to injury, applicants are also getting ghosted by recruiters. Honestly, job seekers can only apply themselves so much.

Polls apart
Trust the stock market, not polls, to predict the winner of the presidential race. That’s the word from Will Daniel, who points out that in hundreds of U.S. elections dating back to 1998, pollsters had an accuracy rate of just 78%. Turns out we’re better off asking the S&P 500. In every presidential election year since 1984, when that blue-chip index rises between August and October, the incumbent party wins. When it falls, the challenger claims the White House. With stock prices mirroring voters’ economic mood, the people have spoken early.

Country retreat
Judging by their actions, Japanese companies no longer trust the Chinese economy. Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Motors both recently bailed on China, where Japan used to be the single biggest investor. In a survey of Japanese businesses operating in the country, almost half said they’ll freeze or cut Chinese investment this year, citing rising wages, plunging prices, and geopolitical tension as their top concerns. Good luck finding a safe haven.

TRUST EXERCISE

“Last week, Kamala Harris released a plan to support small businesses by increasing tax credits and ‘cutting red tape.’ Donald Trump responded by saying he would slash regulation and vowing to eliminate 10 government regulations for every new one enacted.

Politicians like Harris and Trump often lament that small businesses are victims of overly burdensome government regulations. However, our research found that medium-sized businesses are actually hit hardest by the costs of regulatory compliance. Furthermore, agencies rarely assess whether the rules they create achieve their intended goals ex-post—or the real cost of regulation to businesses and the economy.”

For anyone chasing votes, casting small businesses as the biggest casualties of “red tape” has become a reflex. Not so fast, warn academics Francesco Trebbi, Michael Simkovic, and Miao Ben Zhang. Rather than rely on gut instinct to drive policy, public officials should put more trust in a data-driven approach to regulation, they argue.

In fact, it’s midsize companies that bear the brunt of government rules. On average, firms with roughly 500 employees spend almost 50% more on compliance costs per worker than small businesses, and nearly 20% more than large companies. Not great.

Part of the reason is that some regulations only apply to medium and large businesses, leaving smaller companies off the hook. Also, thanks to their economies of scale, big firms can hire people and create systems to handle compliance and reporting more efficiently.

That can leave midsize companies struggling to grow. To tackle the problem, Trebbi, Simkovic, and Zhang suggest that regulators do follow-up research to find out if rules end up imposing costs that exceed their benefits. Pilot programs could also help determine if a regulation is worth the expense. As for politicians, faced with the truth about where the regulatory burden falls, they might have to find a new rallying cry.