Mastering Your "Why": How HR Can Effectively Share the Company Vision

Your HR strategy supports your company's bigger objectives. Often, launching new products or taking the company into different markets requires both a focus on acquiring certain talent and clear communication to the employees you already have. In tight talent markets, your mission and vision can help persuade top candidates to join your firm — and keep top-tier talent connected with your mission. And articulating your company's "why" can help your current workforce stay focused. Take a look at how developing an HR strategy can help your company achieve its most important goals.

Create a Mission and Vision Statement

A fundamental step in helping your employees feel connected to the company's bigger mission is to create mission and vision statements. A mission statement is a concise articulation of your company's most important values and goals, while a vision statement explains how you accomplish those objectives. As part of your HR strategy, a mission and vision statement can help you answer questions such as:

• What's the company's overarching goal?
• Who do you serve?
• What's your key differentiation point? What separates your company from the competition?
• What are your most important values around execution and delivery?
• What's the bigger "why" behind your products, services, and strategy?

Incorporate Your Mission into the Hiring Process

It’s beneficial to express your "why" as part of the hiring process. Ensure that your employer branding — such as your job ads and careers website — showcases your mission and explores what that means on a day-to-day basis. Bring your mission into the interview process to find candidates who really understand what you're trying to achieve, and who exhibit a long-term potential cultural fit.

Bring the Mission into Your Team Culture

Your mission can also help focus your current employees on achieving more. Use your company's "why" as a way to help keep focus in company-wide meetings, leadership retreats, and team gatherings. How are you performing with regards to your mission, and in what ways would it communicate your focus during a specific meeting? A mission can act as a rallying cry that unites your workforce, which is possible to achieve by:

• Having executives routinely speak about the mission and relate it back to the activities at hand;
• Exploring your company's current performance in light of the mission;
• Including the mission in one-on-one conversations and as a regular part of larger meetings;
• Asking teams to articulate how their departments and individual roles support the bigger mission; and
• Periodically holding discussions about the mission and vision, and how your team's understanding of it might need to evolve in light of changing market dynamics

Build Your Mission into Management Processes

You can achieve a deeper alignment around your company's "why" by building your mission into your management culture. Encourage managers to include discussions of the company mission and how it ties back into what you're working on during team meetings, one-on-one meetings, and skip-level conversations. As your HR strategy rolls down into team goals and individual key performance indicators for annual reviews, make sure the goals explicitly tie back to the mission and vision. During the review process, evaluate performance in these areas and include open discussions about how the employee's work is supporting the bigger "why." Taking this hands-on approach helps ensure that employees and their contributions are connected to the company’s larger goal.

Ultimately, your HR strategy plays an important role in communicating the company's greater mission and culture. From developing a clear focus on the impact you want to have in the world to incorporating your mission into the goals and review process, having a centralized mission for your company can help you hire the right people and keep your team productive.