Prioritizing your Mission, Vision, and Values
If you’re an employer, are you confident that your employees could accurately tell you what your organization’s objectives are, and how you plan to get there? While determining an organization’s mission, vision and values is often a point of major focus for anyone creating a business plan, it can be too easy to lose sight of them as formalities once the business is operational. However, these three simplified statements, if used to your advantage, can be used as critical tools to clearly communicate to your employees how they fit into the larger picture of your organization achieving its goals. In turn, employees that clearly understand what the ultimate objectives of their organization are can work effectively to ensure they become a reality.
An organization’s vision can be described as “a statement that succinctly describes the goals of a company, non-profit or some other entity”. On the other hand, an organization’s mission can be defined as “a sentence or short paragraph that defines the existence of a business, nonprofit, government organization or any other entity.” It’s common that mission statements and vision statements get confused, but the major difference between the two is that the vision statement focuses on an organization’s future, while a mission statement focuses on its present. A mission statement answers the question, “who are we?” whereas a vision statement answers the question “where are we going?”. In general, a vision statement is also quite broad and overarching, while a mission statement usually provides specific information on an organization’s strategic goals.
An organization’s values can then be described as “the boundaries within which an organization will operate in pursuit of its vision”. These boundaries are meant to be the pillars that define an organization’s behaviourial code as it works to accomplish both its day-to-day activities and its larger-picture objectives. Values are meant to be rigid, meaning an organization should never compromise on its values, and should be “willing to pay a price to uphold” them. While a business can have as many values as it likes, in general, there will be smaller set of core values that take precedence over the rest (ballpark, about 5 to 7).
When analyzed together, an organization’s mission, vision and values provide a framework for what an organization wishes to accomplish, how they’re going to do it and why. There are a variety of great examples to draw from, but one great example is that of the outerwear business Patagonia. Their mission, vision, and values are as follows:
Mission: We’re in business to save our home planet.
Vision: A love of wild and beautiful places demands participation in the fight to save them, and to help reverse the steep decline in the overall environmental health of our planet.
Core Values: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to protect nature and don’t be bound by convention.
This post is not explicitly intended to help you write your mission, vision and values, as if you’re an employer, you should already have them set. Beyond that, your mission, vision and values should not be something your organization changes on a whim. While these statements can be refreshed occasionally over time as your business pivots and changes its offerings, these three concepts should be relatively inflexible. It’s important to view your mission, vision and values as the driving force behind your business, and they should work together to serve as a guide for your employees as they carry out their daily duties. In theory, if an employee of yours was ever faced with a question of how to handle a problem while at work, they should be able to turn to your mission, vision and values to provide a road map for how to appropriately solve that problem in a manner that lines up with your organization’s philosophy.
There is a great deal to be gained when an organization makes a point of ensuring its employees clearly understand the larger mission that drives their organization forward. Though all businesses seek to profit through their operations by necessity, the larger purpose that drove an organization’s founders to start the business in the first place is what’s truly effective in creating a strong sense of employee engagement. Employee engagement is proven to be an essential component of an organization’s overall success. In a study interviewing more than 550 top-level business executives conducted by the Harvard Business Review, 71% of respondents agreed that employee engagement is very important to achieving overall organizational success. From our above example, you can imagine that everyone who works for Patagonia is extremely invested in reversing climate change and protecting the natural world, and are thus likely very engaged in their professional duties as they work towards Patagonia’s larger goals. Employees that are engaged in their job care whether or not their organization succeeds, will defend their organization when it’s criticized and approach their work with enthusiasm. Having a team of employees that feel this kind of connection with their jobs is essential to an organization’s survival.
While it may seem innocuous to let your employees work without the ability to recite your mission, vision and values back to you, a team that doesn’t understand its objectives ultimately has no road map to follow. In turn, an employee that doesn’t have a clear understanding of the ultimate goals behind their day-to-day actions thus isn’t likely to feel a high level of engagement with their professional responsibilities. Most people who don’t understand their purpose at work can’t fake a sense of connection to their job, even if they’re being paid an above-average wage. The opposite of an engaged team member is a burned out, distracted and uninterested employee, and having a team that’s not engaged in their professional duties represents a massive drain on an employer’s resources. In an article for Forbes.com, Karlyn Borysenko estimates that disengagement on the job increases absenteeism, lowers productivity and reduces profitability to a degree that roughly 34% of a disengaged employee's salary is lost; that means, for every $10,000 an employer pays their employee, $3,400 of that figure is lost. In other words, if your employees are disengaged from their roles, just over one-third of the money you pay them is not being used effectively.
With that in mind, you may be thinking about how you can make changes to your leadership strategy to better include your organization’s mission, vision and values. According to that aforementioned study by the Harvard Business Review, one of the best ways a business can ensure their team stays engaged is by making sure that well-communicated goal alignment is occurring at every level of an organization. That means, the top level creates business objectives, middle managers create objectives for their teams to follow to reach these objectives and employees are given the tools they need to carry out whatever tasks are required to reach the objectives determined by the top level. However, this could also mean making your mission, vision and values clear wherever possible; have them stated clearly on your website, in all company briefings and literature, in any onboarding materials and so on. It can be easy to assume that every one of your employees is on the same page when it comes to the larger objective at hand, but if you haven’t taken the time to ensure they know your mission, you can’t blame them for being confused. Restating your mission, vision and values on a regular basis will help reinforce them in your team’s minds, meaning they’re more likely to be front-of-mind while your employees solve problems and make key decisions.
Another way to improve your team’s engagement level is to simply ask them about what they think should change within your organization. This is a particularly effective strategy if your employees are already clear on your organization’s mission, vision and values. In general, people at the top level of an executive chain and those who work at the lower levels of an organization have very different day-to-day duties as part of their positions, and as such, often have different perspectives on how an organization gets from point A to B. Those at the lower levels are going to have valuable insights into the way that commonly-relied upon processes actually work, and may be able to shed light on where upper-level employees could improve systems to encourage a higher engagement rate. For example, a manager may assume that their organization’s onboarding process is flawless in its design, but an employee who’s recently gone through that onboarding process as a new hire may be able to point out areas that they found vague, confusing, difficult or unnecessary. Or, an employee may be able to highlight a recurring company practice that doesn’t seem to contribute to the organization’s greater mission, or that doesn’t align with the organization’s values. These kinds of changes can show employees that their opinion is valued within the organization and can help them feel more emotionally attached to their position overall, on top of helping the organization stay true to its founding principles.
Ultimately, if you’re interested in boosting employee engagement, it makes sense to use your organization’s mission, vision and values as tools to help you reach that goal. As mentioned, the reason your organization got into business to start with (beyond profit) is likely what resonates with your employees more than anything, and is what inspired them to apply for a job with you in the first place. People want to feel connected to the work they do every day, and feel that their contribution is important in the scheme of achieving a larger goal. It should, of course, be said that fair compensation is an essential piece of the puzzle here; a passionate connection to one’s job can’t pay one’s bills or count towards rent payments (people need to know they’re financially secure in addition to being valued by their organization). However, if your organization can offer your employees both a strong degree of financial support and a clear vision to work towards, a mission to follow and values to uphold, the sky is the limit!
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