Are your people clear on what your organisation's vision and mission are?
Do they understand the values that underpin what you do and the way that you do it?
Whether you’re a small, medium, or large business, a clear vision, mission and values should be the backbone of your strategy. They should be aligned to your ultimate purpose as a business and seen as a key enabler to long term growth and success.
Worryingly however, according to research carried out in this area, 52% of employees don’t know what their company’s vision is, 1 in 5 employees don’t feel their employer’s values are reflected in the daily behaviours of staff, and 27% of them felt the values contained too much corporate jargon, so were not clear enough to give employees direction.1
With an increasing number of employees looking for a role that brings a sense of purpose to their lives, ensuring that your people understand, feel part of, and can relate to your company’s vision, mission and values is critical.
"Employees expect their jobs to bring a significant sense of purpose to their lives. Employers need to help meet this need or be prepared to lose talent to companies that will.”2
For many organisations, the pace of change, coupled with a challenging economic climate, has meant their internal communications have become increasingly tactical. Whilst understandable, not aligning tactical messages to the wider organisational purpose and strategy is likely to reduce engagement at a time when companies need it the most.
So, how can you better bring your corporate values to life? How can you support your business to embed them in people’s day to day working lives?
Company culture isn’t the responsibility of one department but as communicators, there are some steps we can take to:
Help employees better understand and relate to their company’s vision and values
Help businesses and senior leaders understand the need to build a deeper understanding of a company’s vision, mission and values and the vital role that communications plays
What are these steps?
1) Review and reflect
Take time to review your vision and values. Do they still reflect who you are as a business and your ethos? Are they clearly articulated? Do they use a tone of voice that feels like your business?
Talk to your people.
Bring together groups of people that represent the diversity of your business to better understand current levels of understanding.
Work with these groups to explore how they interpret the values and gather examples of how these values are displayed by their teams during the working day.
Take time to talk through the company vision and how your people can actively help in its delivery.
Use this feedback to update your vision and values (if needed), and share the work you’ve done as part of your vision and values communications plan.
2) Take action
Think about the actions your leaders and managers can take to demonstrate your company values and actively make them more than words on a page.
There will be many initiatives already underway – awareness days, recognition awards, back to the floors to name a few – that should be part of your strategy to show your values in action. Define what these events are, when they’re happening, the communications needed to support them, and how they align to the wider vision, mission and values.
If you don’t have any such events in place yet, work with your leadership team and the advisory groups you’ve created to develop initiatives grounded in who you are as a business.
BUT…don’t introduce another programme or scheme for the sake of it or without doing some research first.
3) Embed
As well as specific activity and initiatives, consciously look at the different events and channels you can use to drive a deeper understanding of your vision, mission and values on a day-to-day basis. Consider:
• How do you weave them into your monthly, quarterly and annual business updates, town halls and events?
• How can they be incorporated into the content you create and design for these events?
• What can you give managers to help them to incorporate your mission and values into their team briefings?
• What other meaningful collateral can you create that will help drive ongoing awareness?
People prefer different types of communication so look at the various communications channels you have at your disposal. Think about how to break down your audiences so you can target them more effectively. Adapt your content for your audience and the channel to make it appeal to the diversity of your people.
4) Be strategic
Make sure your communications strategy is aligned to the company vision, mission and values as well as the business strategy.
Map out the role communications can play to embed these key elements and articulate this clearly within your communications strategy.
Attach success metrics: for instance, metrics aligned to productivity, engagement or employee recruitment and retention.
5) Check and ask questions
Check back in with employees as part of your annual engagement survey or regular pulse surveys. Ask questions that test people’s understanding of the company vision, mission and values and their role in delivering them.
If the results aren’t quite what you hoped, delve a bit deeper, carry out a listening exercise and feed this back into the advisory group you created.
With your organisation’s mission, vision and values so fundamental to long-term success, the work you do and the initiatives you launch should be founded on these core principles and articulated in this way to employees.
Taking a step back from the day to day isn’t always easy, but investing time in getting this right will reap rewards.
References
1. https://incentiveandmotivation.com/52-employees-dont-know-companys-vision/
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave