Happiness is recognized as an important part of wellbeing. However, it turns out, according to an international survey by Gallup, that the number one determinant for happiness around the world is having a “good” job.
And the most essential part of happiness at work is doing a job that has a clear purpose – that makes a difference.
“You have a sense of purpose when you make valuable contributions to others, individuals, organisations or society, that you find personally meaningful and don’t harm anyone.”
Great at Work by Morten Hanson
So, if you want a committed and well-motivated team you need to create an environment that allows them to give their best work.
- Purpose and Mission
Purpose and Mission are different ideas.
An organisation’s Purpose is the reason why the business exists. It is primary benefit was it created to achieve, for example, “solve world hunger.” or “improve communications”. Whereas, a Mission statement explains what the organization plans to work on to achieve its purpose.
The Purpose describes the “Why”. The Mission looks at the “What and the How”.
- Your Vision
What are the key outcomes you want to achieve over the next 3 – 5 years. Are these plans an ambitious way to advance your core purpose? - Values
Your staff want to know that your business has values about how it will treat all its stakeholders that they can sign up to.
If you don’t have any of these in place, you are missing a huge opportunity to inspire your team, improve retention and employee satisfaction.
A purpose and values-based framework is also a powerful approach to business improvement, ensuring that all functions of your business are aligned, act in a consistent way towards all your stakeholders.
Purpose & Mission
- The Good: this purpose is motivated by service to others. They are focused on improving wellbeing, such as health, education, communication and quality of life.
- The Beautiful: businesses that have a purpose of the beautiful focus on excellence in design and creativity. Many of these businesses will harness technology to achieve their purpose.
- The True: many of the organisations with this purpose focus on discovery and furthering human knowledge. Progressing knowledge and understanding is valuable in its own right.
- The Heroic: the heroic purpose can be any of the above three. However, the difference is that a heroic purpose dares to make a significant change to the world even where this could be risky or involve danger.
Your Purpose statement, regardless of which you choose, needs to be a benefit statement, ideally one sentence or two short sentences and it should be instantly understandable.
Your Mission statement, however, deals with how, in broad terms, you are going to achieve your mission. It needs to give clarity about the types of activity you intend to take and the types of work your team will do.
So, an organization may have a purpose which is to increase wellbeing across the world. This purpose could be achieved in many different ways: medical research, mental health services, a gym or yoga classes.
For example, a local charity I work with has the purpose to “create a cleaner, healthier and more active Exeter”. Its mission makes clear the types of activity it is involved in: “to encourage more people to ride bicycles more often”.
Vision
Once you have confirmed your purpose, your vision is your north star. It is where you want to move the organization over the next 3, 5 or 10 years.
Your vision is what your team members will be working on. Whereas the Purpose statement is primarily about inspiration, your vision is about what you can achieve together. The vision pulls the team together towards a common purpose.
Your vision needs to be ambitious and achievable and brings you closer to achieving your Purpose.
A key issue here is not to allow the excitement over the vision to allow it to move outside your Purpose, since your business strategy will be built from our vision.
Values
The power of creating a set of values can be overlooked by organisations. Sadly, many values statements are often a series of platitudes.
However, Values are a key element in turning the high-level vision statements into something that can be applied on a day to day basis.
Your values should be your everyday lived experience and is a framework to guide the behaviour across the organization, from the most junior of staff to senior management.
The journey to become Purpose-led
In theory, creating a purpose-led framework for a business doesn’t look particularly difficult.
If the business truly wishes to become purpose-driven then this is likely to have a profound influence on what the organization does and how it does it.
Importantly, it needs to be a collaborative process involving staff and customers and should also include feedback from other stakeholders such as suppliers.A Purpose Driven approach cannot be imposed on the organization, it needs to be a collective approach.
A Purpose-led approach is likely to lead to new way of thinking about the business. Some questions include:
- How does the business understand and take account of its mission and the various stakeholders in the business? And how does it balance their competing needs?
- When deciding on business strategy, what activities should be undertaken to meet the business mission? Do we currently do things that don’t fit with our mission?
- How do we engage with our different stakeholders particularly our customers and employees?
- Considering suppliers and procurement policies. Do we treat suppliers as collaborators in our success (especially as 90% produced by most business is provided by suppliers)? Do your suppliers’ practices align with your mission and values? If not, how do we address this?
Working on your organisation
Once you have your core mission and vision and you have identified your values where is the best place to start working on your organization.
While customers can be seen as the most important stakeholder in a business. As Peter Drucker pointed out,
“There is only one purpose of a business: to create a customer.”
However, you can’t influence customers directly, you will do it through your team.
Therefore, the best place to start your journey will be working with your team to ensure that they understand and commit to the corporate mission and vision. And then to build an environment where they feel trusted and empowered to act in the best interests of customers for the good of the business.
Learn more about Purpose Based Communication here