by Venchito Tampon | Last Updated on May 5, 2025
What is Work Attitude and Values Enhancement?
Work Attitude and Values Enhancement (WAVE) program is behavioral and values-based training for employees in the government or private sector that strengthens key work ethics such as discipline, honesty, and accountability. The goal of this training is to build a healthy and strong employee mindset, improve workplace behavior, and align individual attitudes and values with the company’s goals and culture.
WAVE training is a popular training program for employees in the government and private sectors in the Philippines. It helps organizations instill values, mindsets, and behavioral change, essential to creating a healthy and productive work environment.
Work Attitude and Work Values
Most professionals see work attitude and work attitude as technically the same, but they actually have different meanings.
Work attitude is an employee’s mindset about their tasks, responsibilities, and colleagues. It is one of the elements at work that affects a person’s ability to respond to feedback, handle stress, and approach their daily duties.
If you take two people into the room, one with a positive attitude will show initiative, stay committed to being productive, and contribute greatly to a healthy work environment. Conversely, someone with a negative attitude would often be observed to be unproductive, causing delays, conflicts, and even disengagement among his peers.
Work values are a person’s principles when making decisions or interacting with others. They include values such as honesty, accountability, discipline, respect, and excellence.
The best part of allowing values enhancement in the workplace is that your employees will function with strong values in dealing with their tasks, earning the trust of their colleagues, managers, and customers.
How Work Attitude and Values Influence the Workplace?
Having both work attitude and work values that shape your employees’ behavior can certainly impact work performance, teamwork, and results. Beyond being just personal traits, these are key drivers of talent development that have a solid effect on business outcomes.
In my experience providing corporate training services for both SMEs and multi-national corporations in the Philippines, these are the five core areas I’ve seen where attitude and values have a measurable impact:
1. Work Quality
As plain as it sounds, having a strong work ethic translates to work ethic, which means you’ll find more ways to achieve accuracy, consistency, and continuous improvement to deliver more value in the work environment.
This is also where you set scenarios in which the employee double-checks their work (to retain work quality), meets agreed timelines, and stays focused on completing tasks with excellence until they get done.
Employees with a strong work ethic, values, and attitude don’t settle for “pwede na”, and often go beyond what is expected (that’s actually how you define “excellence” for this matter).
2. Team Collaboration
From individual work excellence, employees with good work values and work attitudes will have their values shared among their team members. You see more shared values, as they are primarily defined—that includes respect, fairness, and open communication, all key ingredients in creating a culture of trust.
In that culture, employees are more open to feedback (and even give constructive input to others), can resolve conflicts without drama, and act professionally (as expected for workers in the Philippines).
They are not hostile to other people but value teamwork and collaboration as work values, which are often visible in the workplace. You see them actively supporting one another’s success, getting inspired by their achievements, and wanting to do more quality work.
3. Resilience and Motivation
Employees with strong work values have what we call a “growth mindset,” which is a way of learning that isn’t fixated on problems and challenges but on the ability to grow and learn despite the odds of trials.
You’ll find these kinds of workers never easily give up after one failure, but rather adjust, learn, and push forward – the type of resilience you need for your employees, if you’re an HR specialist, or for your business if you’re an entrepreneur.
4. Professional Reputation
As work values and attitudes translate to results (“work performance”), employees are later rewarded with professional reputation—praise from colleagues, trust among colleagues, and potentially a salary raise.
Employees who show professional values, including integrity, dependability, and self-discipline, would make trust a core part of their professional identity. They become go-to or reliable people who will later become mentors and future leaders in the company.
And mind you, professionalism among employees is contagious, helping you shape a culture of higher standards of both work and values across the company.
5. Customer Experience
Work values not only reflect within the four corners of the office but ultimately affect how employees create a memorable customer experience.
Think of it this way: If employees show values like empathy, honesty, and service orientation, which are crucial to delivering the best customer service and experience, you can expect longer lifetime value for customers, positive brand recognition, and stronger brand loyalty – just to name a few.
Objectives of WAVE Programs
WAVE (Work Attitude and Values Enhancement) programs are not your typical motivational training. This type of program is high in demand because it helps companies share work behavior and reinforce company values (top-down approach) among employees.
Below are high-impact objectives of WAVE programs:
1. Strengthen the Link Between Self-Awareness and Behavior
One of the primary objectives of WAVE programs that lean towards the personality development of target participants is that they get to understand how their internal mindset influences their external actions.
One objective of the WAVE program is to help your participants reach the starting point for real behavioral change: self-awareness.
Self-awareness includes knowing your emotional triggers, patterns, and default responses at work so you can respond appropriately when they occur.
2. Rewire Negative Work Habits with Daily Value-Based Actions
WAVE programs aim to replace counterproductive habits (e.g., “mañana habit,” blame-shifting, toxic communication) with daily actions based on solid values like respect, self-discipline, and proper accountability.
As mentioned earlier, employees who possess these values can develop new work routines that are aligned with the organization’s expectations and serve the needs of their customers or clients.
3. Align Personal Purpose with Organizational Mission
One unique objective of WAVE Programs is that it helps connect an employee’s purpose to the company’s broader goals (potentially aligned to its mission).
It is important for them to see how their individual role matters to the business’s bigger picture of operations, as this will dictate even more how they’ll be more engaged, consistent, and committed at work.
This alignment between personal purpose and an organization’s mission, vision, and core values makes successful companies thrive and grow even more.
4. Build Professional Behavior Aligned with Company Standards
Professionalism is the core of an organization’s context when running a business. These include acting with integrity without supervision, showing mutual respect, and owning mistakes (accountability).
WAVE training emphasizes just that—professionalism. The higher the standards of your employees, the higher the work quality you can expect from them in the long run.
5. Instill Values That Promote Responsibility and Collaboration
WAVE programs emphasize developing and mastering core values for employees, as this promotes true collaboration and business success.
Corporate trainers will align organizational values and truly bring the core values to life on behalf of the company’s L&D and management through proper training delivery and evaluation of competencies for work attitude and work values training.
Key Components of Work Attitude and Values Enhancement (WAVE) Programs
Each component of WAVE training programs is designed to tackle a specific area of attitude, values, and behavior change, which makes this corporate training program more impactful and sustainable.
1. Self-Awareness and Mindset Check
This is one of the standard components of WAVE programs that usually initiates the training day – where participants begin to reflect on their current work mindset, habits, and behavior.
Through self-check-ins and reflection, participants would recognize gaps between how they work now and what is expected or what they want to become. These gaps could be skills, attitude, and behavioral gaps that, if addressed, would result in observable improvements for the participants.
This is where a training facilitator must be equipped to make it comfortable for participants and allow them to see the benefits of doing self-reflection.
2. Rewiring Negative Work Habits with Daily Value-Based Actions
One decisive goal of the WAVE program is to help employees break unproductive work habits that are preventing them from reaching their full potential as professionals.
The WAVE program can help participants address these real behavioral patterns (not just theory) by replacing these destructive habits with consistent, values-driven actions that align well with their self-identity.
By identifying these habits (through self-reflection activities, personal assessments, and team feedback) and engaging in action-based rewriting, participants can build new routines grounded in values such as personal accountability, respect, and consistency.
To give you an example of a habit-rewriting process using micro actions – learning and mastering small but specific behaviors repeated daily will help reshape the employee’s mindset and reinforce the organization’s expectations.
3. Align Personal Purpose with Organizational Mission
WAVE training isn’t solely focused on personal development, so one core component that makes it unique as a training program is connecting participants’ individual sense of purpose to the larger mission of the organization.
Training facilitators need context and deep information about the organization they’re engaging with to easily translate and facilitate the entire training session in this personal-organization alignment.
Generally, WAVE program facilitators will go through three methods to align personal purpose with organizational mission:
- Role Impact: Employees would have to understand their work’s direct value and impact on the organization’s bigger picture, serving their target customers or clients.
- Value Match – they see where their personal and company values overlap.
- Direction Check – evaluate objectively if their personal growth (holistic) aligns with the organization’s vision.
The fair objective in WAVE training is not to achieve perfect alignment but to recognize shared meaning that will have a lasting impact when employees display their actions.
4. Group Sharing and Commitment Conversations
An essential component of WAVE programs is creating space for group sharing and commitment conversations. Some people usually assess more of themselves through interpersonal efforts—this is where you turn honest conversations with other participants into self-accountability, leading to team accountability.
Participants are encouraged to speak up and share their insights in a guided group setting—not casual but structured enough to help employees verbalize the attitudes or behaviors they need to improve and hear how others are also working through similar challenges. This kind of vulnerability gives them more courage to face their professional problems head-on.
Studies say that when employees vocalize what they want to change or improve, it creates social responsibility and reinforces the habits they want to build.
A group setting reinforces three critical components: shared ownership, peer learning, and collective standards. Combined, these can help establish a strong incentive for participants to commit to lifelong discipline and personal change.
5. Application Planning
Many training programs stop at awareness, but WAVE, as a good example, goes further by helping employees translate what they’ve learned into clear, daily actions tied to their roles and responsibilities.
Knowledge and theory on paper are good, but you won’t see real positive reinforcement unless you turn them into action.
Application Planning, the action-based component of every WAVE session in the Philippines, helps ensure that insights and realizations from the training program can turn applied knowledge into concrete value-driven behaviors at work.
Generally, this WAVE component is done individually but facilitated in a structured format. In this format, employees are encouraged to write down specific actions that relate to their work functions and the values emphasized in the training (e.g., accountability, teamwork, integrity, discipline).
For instance, a person who doesn’t feel productive would write their practical application action: “Every morning, I will list my top 3 priorities and complete them before responding to non-urgent emails.”
This exact statement forces the person to translate his training-related learnings into micro actions needed to reinforce a specific habit.
Application planning typically goes through the process to make it achievable for participants:
- Action Identification – What behavior will change?
- Value Connection – Which company value supports this action?
- Context Anchoring – When and where will this action take place?
- Follow-through Mechanism – How will I know I’m succeeding?
Training facilitators will help participants move from one phase to another in this process and ensure they have measurable output at the end of the day. They may provide templates for habit tracking, journals for weekly reflections, and sample behavior-action mapping charts to make it more feasible for the participants.
WAVE Training by Rainmakers
WAVE Training by Rainmakers has helped thousands of Filipino teams build the right work habits and values that drive real performance.
From frontline workers to tenured employees, our sessions are designed to create visible mindset shifts that align with your company culture.
Learn more about our WAVE Training Program in the Philippines.
WAVE Training Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs)
These are questions that employees, managers, and HR leaders often ask (or should ask) when considering Work Attitude and Values Enhancement (WAVE) programs.
1. What is the difference between attitude and behavior at work?
Attitude is a person’s internal mindset (beliefs, feelings, and outlook about work) while behavior is the visible action that results from that mindset.
Imagine an employee with a respectful attitude. Their behavior typically includes active listening, a calm tone, respectful nonverbal language, and courteous responses to people.
WAVE programs will focus on shifting attitude (how people think) and behavior (what people do) to create long-term, lasting performance change.
2. How long does it take to see results from a WAVE program?
Initial shifts in behavior, especially in punctuality, communication tone, and accountability, can be observed as early as the first week after the WAVE program.
However, lasting cultural change generally takes 30 to 90 days for people to see actual results, especially when reinforced through leadership support, feedback loops, training check-ins (follow-throughs), and values-based sessions in the workplace.
3. Can WAVE training change a toxic culture?
Yes, but not alone. WAVE training can spark a cultural change among employees as they recognize their harmful attitudes (potentially toxic behavior) and replace them with shared values.
A true culture shift often requires leadership modeling among managers, supervisors, and top executives, clean and structured policy alignment (by HR), and consistent employee accountability.
4. What industries benefit most from WAVE programs?
WAVE programs in the Philippines benefit most companies in different sectors. They apply mainly to the government sector, where accountability is highly needed.
But for private companies, you’ll find WAVE training programs being conducted for:
- Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
- Retail and Customer Service
- Manufacturing and Logistics
- Healthcare and Public Service
The Author
