5 Things You Need to Create Your Purpose-Driven Strategy
The process of clarifying your mission, vision and values with an effective purpose-driven strategy should not simply be a box-ticking exercise. When done effectively, it builds motivation and meaning for your customers and employees, making your company the one that people want to buy from and work for. In this article, you’ll discover the five most important factors you need to create your purpose-driven strategy to stand out as a company, to attract employees and customers without competing on price.
1. Purpose-Driven Strategy: You Need to Know Your People
Businesses in today’s market of near-unlimited choice need to know who they are for and who they are not for, whether that be employees, customers, or even shareholders and other key stakeholders. This goes deeper than simple demographics. It’s a holistic understanding of the beliefs, behaviours, and attitudes of individuals at every level of your business. To create a purpose-driven strategy, you must ask yourself these questions:
What’s most important to your ideal employee in their career and work?
What does your specific customer actually value most?
Are your investors involved for another reason other than pure profit?
Steve Jobs understood the importance of getting almost uncomfortably close to your people. “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” This sentiment could just as easily be applied to employees.
2. Purpose-Driven Strategy: You Must Keep Lines of Communication Open
To create a purpose-driven strategy, you must understand what matters to your people - and to do this, you need a way to facilitate communication. Your business requires input to succeed, and your people are looking for a meaningful way to contribute. Some companies choose to focus on surveys and third-party research, but there are many tools to maintain a regular rhythm of communication.
For example, PlayStation Europe realized its employee intranet could help create a unified workplace culture, but it hadn’t been updated in years, and employees weren't using it. Important communications were getting lost, so Playstation re-designed and launched The Hub. This new-and-improved intranet made it easy and fun to share personal updates but also to give real-time feedback and receive company communications. As a result, every measurement metric in their Employee Opinion Survey at least doubled after its launch.
Whatever the communication channel, internal or external, the most important facet is openness and honesty.
3. Purpose-Driven Strategy: Incorporate Insight
People-focused businesses are masters of synthesising data and transforming it into insights that tell them what matters most to the people that matter most to them. This isn’t an exercise in self-aggrandisement. For example, Microsoft found that organisations that leverage their customer behaviour to generate insights outperform their competition by 85% in sales growth.
But it’s not just about customer optimisation - focused insights are also crucial to employee engagement. For example, Google analysed employee surveys and performance reviews to establish patterns of keywords and phrases and looked for ways to “build a better boss.” They used the data to discern the characteristics of effective managers and devised a list of 8 qualities like “Be a good coach” and “Don’t be a sissy - be productive and result-oriented.”
Now, Google uses this list as a directive for managers, thereby turning the data into something with an impact on the business itself.
4. Purpose-Driven Strategy: Close Feedback Loops Effectively
Once you’ve incorporated insights into your purpose-driven strategy, you need a way to get that information back to the source: your people. People-focused companies will regularly summarize what they heard from their audience to their audience. It usually sounds something like, “We heard what you said. Here is how we implemented your feedback and the impact it had on our business/workplace/your experience.”
Whatever the channel (e.g. employee intranet, company website, newsletters, social media), the communication needs to be continuous. The result of a feedback loop like this is the creation of a culture where people have more willingness to share because they feel heard. When people continue to share feedback, you have more insights to incorporate into your purpose-driven strategy, which you then report back. Now you have a self-sustaining loop that can increase satisfaction, engagement, and commercial success.
5. Purpose-Driven Strategy: Above All, Define Your Purpose
A purpose-driven business is one that has a core belief that brings the company together. It’s the why behind what they do, and it’s an essential part of a successful business. In a 2017 Ipsos poll, 67% of people globally agreed that it’s important for their favourite brands to positively contribute to society. Purpose has become a crucial reason consumers and employees choose one company over another.
Harley Davidson’s company page has explored how its purpose is integrated at every level, internally and externally, focusing on the themes of courage, innovation, leadership, and “the timeless pursuit of adventure.” Lululemon, meanwhile, explores how their shared belief to “elevate the world by realising the full potential within every one of us” integrates into their strategies and decision-making process.