Sharing your company’s sense of purpose

Leaders, what gets you out of bed and motivated for work every morning? It’s likely a personal sense of purpose, a “why” for your work. It’s important to remember that your employees often have found their own why. These personal purposes can apply to areas outside of work, but it’s also likely that they overlap with the purpose of your organization—to the mutual benefit of the organization and its employees.

In fact, recent research by Truist Leadership Institute shares the wide-ranging benefits of implementing your organization’s purpose through your people. If you’ve been following our thought leadership series on “New Worker Psychology,” including our Purple Paper “Why we work,” you might already have started thinking about and working on how to activate company purpose at your organization.

A key step is successfully communicating your purpose initiative internally. If a message about your company’s purpose never leaves the C-suite, it’s not actually shared—and you and your employees won’t reap the full benefits. To effectively communicate purpose in a way that gets buy-in, you need to plan and organize a multichannel, always-on effort to communicate what the company wants to accomplish via its purpose, and how each employee’s individual purpose connects. Here are three important concepts that can help you do that.

Get the word out

Prepare your internal campaign materials all at once. Most of these materials should be fact sheets to arm your mid-level managers and employees with ideas and answers. Provide separate fact sheets for each audience that:

• Provide a clear definition of the company’s purpose and examples of it. 
• Explain how managers and leaders can support their employees and help them connect to the organization’s purpose. Consider using an FAQ format to give answers to 10 likely questions about company purpose.
• Detail what employees can expect to see in the next six to 12 months as the company connects employees with purpose. This might include changes to performance reviews to include metrics relating to how individuals are contributing to purpose initiative goals. It might include changes to signage in physical spaces, new information categories on the company’s website, or even a new look or section on a public-facing website.

Once these are ready, kick off the initiative with a CEO message all employees receive via email, as an audio recording, or live at a company meeting. Make it personal, not just a bland memo or intranet story.

Next, share the materials that dig into more of the details.

Promote through action

Provide employees and team leaders with the time and recommendations for four or five activities they can do together to connect with the company’s purpose. This takes your initiative off the screen and into the real world, making it more memorable and tangible.

What you suggest will vary depending on how you are bringing your purpose to life. For example, if your purpose is centered on doing business more sustainably or inclusively, a team might want to look at the environmental impact of the company’s supplies and equipment, or at the inclusive profile of suppliers.

If your purpose is related to using technology to solve clients’ challenges, perhaps volunteering to provide free services or training in the community for an afternoon would be a fit.

Keep your story authentic

Everyone can smell the difference between fresh and sour milk. In other words, a true sense of purpose and a genuine commitment are impossible to fake. Once you begin to share your organizational purpose, people will want to feel they are part of a purpose-driven company and not part of a slick marketing campaign.

To avoid that, keep communications authentic. Don’t exaggerate, add elaborate language, or overpromise. Saying, “We’re going to bring peace on Earth next Tuesday,” is inauthentic. Saying, “We’re going to do our part to meet a need in our community next Tuesday” is achievable and believable. Remember, the key benefits of a companywide purpose are boosts to employee engagement, retention, and well-being. If you alienate employees in your communications, you’ll be losing before you’ve started.

You’ll also want to consider a way to measure what works and what doesn’t. Surveys are easy and effective ways to measure employee engagement and the success of specific communication tactics. Use anonymous digital tools or lean on your human resources team to conduct pulse surveys before and throughout the initiative. 

You can also host periodic, informal focus groups where managers discuss the initiative with their teams and collect first-person feedback. Employees can write feedback on preprinted forms, or the manager can take notes on the conversation to share back.

The important step is to act on what you hear—whether it’s verbal or written feedback or from a survey. Employees will remain engaged if they see action being taken based on their input. And that’s important, as ongoing engagement is one of the keys to successful purpose implementation for any organization.