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The age-old problem that employees "don't behave in the way [employers] expect them to" can partly be attributed to organisations relying on values that are far too vague, a culture consultant says.

"There's never a set of values that you see and go, 'I don't agree with that, I couldn't join that company because those values'," Hope Collins tells HR Daily.

Values are "great to have", she says, but they can be very open to interpretation. What employers really need is to "have things that people can disagree with; that people can look at and go, 'Actually, maybe this company isn't for me, because of the way they expect me to behave, or the way they behave'".

The gap that lies between the intent behind a set of overarching organisational values, and the way leaders and employees actually behave, requires actual "commitments", Collins says...