It’s important, now more than ever, that your associates understand, fully embrace, and support the purpose of your business. Millennials and Gen Z employees have taken over the workforce, and they are incredibly loyal to brands whose purpose resonates with them.
Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. If your company's purpose comes across as bland, weak, uninspiring, or irrelevant to your associates, you can be sure you’re leaving a crippling amount of latent potential, productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue on the table.
Hubert Joly, the former CEO of Best Buy, defines purpose as the intersection of four important things:
1) What human needs are you trying to address in the world?
2) What are you uniquely good at?
3) What are you passionate about?
4) How are you going to make money?
It’s an unfortunate reality that many companies define their purpose as it relates to a multi-stakeholder landscape. But this abstract, uninspiring, and irrelevant “purpose” (which I submit to you is not a purpose at all) does not relate to a frontline associate.
If your frontline associates don’t see your organization as addressing an actual human need in the world if they don’t feel “good at” or passionate about helping accomplish that purpose, and if they don’t see a pathway to financially supporting themselves and their families by addressing that purpose, you can bet you’ll have painful turnover, low employee NPS scores, disengagement, poor productivity, and suffering customer satisfaction.
So what do we do about it? Here are some practical steps for you to consider.
Explore a more powerful and inspiring company purpose.
Communicate that company purpose with your associates directly.
Use town halls, corporate communication, and frontline leadership conversations.
Daily, repeatedly reinforce that company purpose in your daily team huddles with every employee, everywhere, and every day.
That last step is key. Most companies do a reasonably good job of the first three steps but thoroughly drop the ball with the fourth. Horst Schulze, the legendary founder of Ritz Carlton, writes in his book Excellence Wins,
“If you intend to be a leader, you need to keep reinforcing what makes your company number one. Otherwise, it will slip.”
That’s why Horst calls the ten minutes in the daily (not occasional, weekly, monthly, etc.) team huddle “the most important in the entire shift.”
Are you having consistent, daily team huddles? Are your leaders talking about the right things, at the right time, that drive the right behaviors in your organization that drive the right results? How do you know?
If you’re like most service industry companies, you don’t, and that leaves a massive gap in current versus potential team member performance at a daily level.
So to recap, do you have an inspiring company purpose? Do your frontline associates know what it is? Are you communicating it in such a way that it is reinforced daily by frontline leaders with every frontline employee?
This is a major gap for most companies, so if you see an opportunity to improve this critical element of your business, don’t fret. Unisyn has been involved in literally thousands of frontline culture transformation and digital transformation initiatives, driving company purpose to the frontlines of organizations just like yours.
We not only understand the challenge but have tangible, pragmatic experience helping mid-market and enterprise companies rapidly improve frontline team culture and performance.
We’d love to hear from you.
Joel Onyshuk
Co-founder
Unisyn: Your Best Team Everywhere
Unisyn, Inc., the Service Industry solution to unlocking frontline leadership consistency and frontline associate engagement, received the award for "Most Innovative or Forward-Thinking Product/Service" from SHFM. Judges were a panel of operators as well as conference attendees who voted on a number of innovations and solutions, including those promoted by PepsiCo, Coca-Cola North America, Ecolab, Impossible Foods, Keurig Dr. Pepper, Panasonic, Red Bull North America, and many other household names.
Based in Tampa, FL., Unisyn's mission is to "Put your best team everywhere" by empowering your frontline teams to bring your mission to life everywhere and every day. According to Gallup, 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager, and Unisyn is the first and only solution to address this unique, global challenge for Service Industry companies with distributed teams.
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