How to Create Employee Driven Mission Statements

This article was written by myself and my fellow eThink Co-Founder and COO, Cheryl Patsavos. 

When we set out to build eThink Education, we knew we wanted to have a mission that truly impacted our employees and clients every day. One of the reasons we chose to build our own company was so we could have a say in the company’s values. As the company grew beyond just the two of us, we realized that if we wanted our mission to be as valuable to our employees as it was to us, we needed to engage our employees in the process of building our mission. Here are some of the things we learned when creating our employee-driven mission and values at eThink Education... 

Think beyond mission 

Before diving into creating our own mission, we spent time looking at other successful companies for inspiration. We examined how they defined their mission; what was important to other service focused companies; and how a company’s mission and values influenced and effected their service quality.  

We decided we wanted to go beyond a mission statement and provide our employees with something more concrete. So, we chose to establish values and behaviors that complemented our mission to give our employees a clear vision for what it means to be an eThinker. Values and behaviors clearly communicate to our employees how to handle interactions with clients, co-workers, and partners every day and they give our clients an explicit idea of what they should expect from an interaction with our employees.  

Understand the why 

Ultimately, our motivation behind why we wanted to create an employee-driven mission was to engage our employees in a conversation about what eThink stands for and to really buy in to the bigger picture. Our mission and values are one part of our service-focused model of business and give our employees concrete ideals to reflect on when determining how they can embody our company.  

Having a strong mission has been shown to positively affect businesses in a number of ways. 81% of people working for companies with a strong mission stated that their stakeholders trusted their leadership team, compared to only 54% in organizations without a strong mission. Workers driven by a mission are also 54% more likely to stay at a company for five years and 30% more likely to grow into high performers. On a wider scale, research by Deloitte shows that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe corporate culture is important to business success and a large portion of that culture can be affected by the values a company holds. The bottom line is building a strong mission can increase the employee trust in leadership, keep them around longer, and lead to higher performance outcomes.  

Working together towards a clear goal 

At eThink, we recently went through a second iteration of building our mission and values. The first time we embarked on creating our employee driven mission, we only had a handful of employees and we sat down at our company retreat to discuss and decide our mission and values all together. In our second iteration, with a team of about 40 members, we wanted to ensure that we still achieved that level of collaboration despite the larger group size and make sure that all team members felt like they had a voice in the process.   

To navigate the process with a larger team we first consulted our leadership team to get their thoughts on whether our previous mission and values still fit the company’s goals. It is important to understand that missions and values don’t need to stay the same throughout the course of a company’s life cycle and adapting them is a way of growing your business. Once our leadership team identified a few ideas for values and missions, we dedicated a company meeting to small and large group discussions diving into the potential ideas. We saw an extremely wide variety of ideas and opinions, further highlighting why engaging our employees in the process is so important. Discussing the potential missions, values, and behaviors brought employees’ visions together and clearly articulated the standards we wanted to set for our employees. Every single one of our employees had the chance to give their opinion on the mission and values and see how the different values related to and affected people from across the company.  

This conversation brought us to our new mission, “To empower organizations to maximize their learning initiatives.” and to our new values: Working Together; Problem Solvers; High-Touch, High-Quality Support; and Open Communication & Transparency. Even the process of determining our new mission and values required the application of our newly identified values as we worked collaboratively and transparently to shape the goals of the company.  

Is engaging your employees worth “the extra work”? 

A company’s mission and values are not impactful if they are not embraced by employees. It is important that your employees feel engaged with the mission or they will not fully embody the behaviors that you are asking them to exemplify. Research shows that 70% of business executives found embracing the company mission boosts employee productivity ‘to a great extent’ and working with your employees to build your mission gives your employees more motivation and ownership over the established mission, leading them to truly reflect the desired behaviors in their everyday work. 

We also encountered a number of interesting nuances and ideas that would have not come to our attention if our mission and values came from the top down. We found employees who are closer to clients and prospects on a daily basis have a more detailed understanding of what the market wants and expects of us as a company.  Our active discussion of what our mission should be also provided clarity on where we can improve as a company. Our business has grown rapidly, from our number of employees and our services offered, and spending time working together on our mission and values gave us all a chance to stop, reflect, and address pockets of confusion that might have existed based on our significant change over the past two years.  The whole process was eye opening and informative for leadership and allowed us to identify some areas where our internal thinking was not in line with our company-wide changes, which we were able to rectify through our new mission and values.  

Continuously engage with your mission & values 

No one business owner has the answer for how to build the perfect mission & values, but it is important to stay committed to your mission and values once you have established them. Our mission and values describe what it means to be an eThinker and our goal is to reflect on them for every decision and interaction, both internal and external. We encourage our employees to reflect on our values and behaviors in every interaction they have, which ultimately leads to a better quality of service for our clients. When looking for new members of the eThink team, we look for people that emulate our mission and values and it ensures that as our company grows, we will maintain the same service and culture that we established when we founded eThink.  

All in all, being able to involve our employees in the process of defining our company’s mission statement, values, and behaviors was an activity that enforced the type of company culture we try to instill here at eThink. Our team members were able to collaborate, be heard, and have a productive and transparent conversation around where the company is heading and how we can collectively support our growth over the coming years. Since finalizing our new mission statement, employees have clear goals to reflect on and to aim for in their daily work – goals that they themselves helped create – which has had a clear impact in terms of morale and engagement. For any company considering refreshing their company mission statement, we recommend taking an employee-generated approach. 

Questions? Feel free to ask us in the comments! Has your company tried a similar approach to creating its mission statement? Is it something you’d consider or would have a positive impact on your culture? We’d love to hear your thoughts. 

To learn more about how eThink is empowering organizations to maximize their learning initiatives, visit www.ethinkeducation.com.