Last year’s Global Attitudes Survey from Pew Research was a reminder of how difficult it can be make work purposeful and engaging for employees. While results differed by country, only 25% of respondents mentioned their occupation or their career when describing what makes life meaningful, consistent with a bevy of research showing a lack of meaning and motivation at work.
Over the last 1-2 decades, companies have been furiously exploring the topic of purpose, catalyzed by research and writing on the topic like Simon Sinek’s Start with Why and by companies as varied as Zappos and Chick-fil-A. This movement has been supported by researchers like Alex Edmonds at the London Business School who found in his book, Grow the Pie, that public companies with great cultures outperform peers by 2.3-3.8% in public markets.
And yet, many companies, teams, and individuals find it hard to craft an appropriate purpose or mission and to make it meaningful for day-to-day work. Elsewhere, I’ve written about how a purposeful workplace and strong culture are more than just the company mission statement. A purposeful workplace is one in which individuals are flourishing comprehensively. But a company’s mission and each individual’s connection to it are a critical component of that broader thriving.
So how can organizations that are serious about purpose create a corporate framework that serves as the north star for each group and individual within a company? Core to accomplishing this is learning to craft purpose at each level of the organization: corporate, team, and individual.
Corporate
Most familiar is the corporate vision or mission. This is typically summarized in a short statement that is intended to provide a compass to all the company’s decisions pointing towards true north and provides an emotional punch to what they do. At DHL, for example, it is “Connecting people. Improving Lives.” This statement reminds DHL’s people that at the heart of everything that they do is the process of connecting people across geographies and helping them to experience life more fully—but it is flexible enough to apply internally to the way colleagues treat one another as well. At Movement Mortgage, the mission is to “love and value people.” This may seem an odd statement for a mortgage company but sets the standard not only for client service but for the way colleagues at Movement treat one another and those in their communities.
The key with corporate purpose, however, is to move beyond a mere statement and to assure that this mission is authentically held and lived out by those in the company (particularly leadership). If a CEO or other senior leaders exhibit or allow behaviors contrary to the company’s stated purpose, that hypocrisy is more destructive to culture than if a purpose had never ben articulated.
Team
While corporate purpose is critically important, the true foundation of activity within a company is often the team. The concept of “team” can range from a few people working together on a project to the leadership of an entire division. Because a team is typically working on something very specific (e.g., client service, accounting, information technology, etc.) it must often adapt the corporate mission and values in a way that is consistent with their intent but better tailored to their day-to-day work.
In my last corporate job, for example, our team came up with a two-page articulation of our collective mission and values as well as a series of practices that reinforced those values. We were careful to assure that all of these statements aligned with our corporate mission and values but dug deeper into the type of team culture we hoped to create. This served the dual purpose of making the corporate purpose more tangible for our group and giving each of us greater ownership over our stated values and practices—after all, we had created them jointly among ourselves in a living and breathing document.
The practice of adapting corporate mission and values to a team is a tool by which leaders can more deeply embed purpose and culture with each individual employee.
Individual
Finally, the smallest unit of any organization is the individual—and each individual is responsible for crafting their own sense of purpose at work. This is liberating in that it frees the individual to have agency over their own experience; but it requires each of us to take conscious responsibility for our experience, building greater meaning into all that we do.
This starts with understanding how the corporate and team purpose apply to us and the work we do. It may involve meeting customers—the true beneficiaries of our work—or at least visualizing how what we do impacts them. But it also involves thinking through how our work serves others, how we can craft it to better accentuate those activities that give us meaning, and how it extends into other activities aligned with the company purpose that lean into our passions.
Coming up with a more personalized vision for the purpose of our work and how it manifests in everything we do can transform our professional experiences.
Conclusion
Everyone needs purpose in their lives and work. We want what we do to mean something. And corporations that find ways to create purpose-driven cultures both better help their people lead more flourishing lives and create sustainable competitive advantage that will allow them to outperform.
Happy Thanksgiving!