Why Having a Shared Company Vision is So Important For Team Motivation
It can be difficult for businesses to find the right team members, but when they do, it can be a real game-changer. However, even if you’ve been one of the lucky organizations to have found a reliable team, have you ever felt like some days your employees seem like they’re just “going through the motions?”
Hopefully, these moments are few and far between. But if you’re beginning to sense a pattern in a general disconnect with your team, chances are there may be a bigger issue regarding maintaining the company’s shared vision.
The Power of Having a Shared Company Vision
A shared company vision may seem like a fairly straightforward concept – create a business mission statement and distribute it to employees. However, defining and implementing a shared vision effectively across the organization requires a much more diligent approach.
Shared company visions are much more than just written statements about how a company was built and the type of market it serves. It’s about identifying the guiding principles that set the organization apart from other businesses in the industry and the steps it takes to keep them evident in everything they do.
A fundamental element of having a shared company vision is that literally, “everyone” in the company values the mission the same way. It represents why everyone gets up and goes to work in the morning (outside of a paycheck), while constantly driving the decisions being made and the projects being prioritized.
Getting everyone in an organization to understand and acknowledge a shared company vision isn’t an easy task by any means. But when company leaders are able to instill this important business component successfully, it can create a number of benefits, including:
Targeted Focus and Alignment
Most modern businesses move at a fast pace, and keeping teams in alignment with new changes can be a constant struggle. When you combine this issue with the fact that more and more companies are making use of distributed workforces and hybrid office settings, communication can quickly start to suffer.
A unified company vision helps keep everyone moving in the same relative direction regardless of their timezone or position. Without it, everyone relies on what objectives are the highest priority for themselves or their teams. Working towards unified goals helps ensure that everyone stays in alignment, moving toward important company milestones that keep the organization on the right growth trajectory.
Improved Company Resilience
There is no shortage of obstacles the company will face as it matures. The goal is to confront these challenges with the right mindset, not allowing them to damage morale or push the company off course.
When you operate with a shared company vision, all members of the company have a shared purpose which helps eliminate any one individual feeling like they’re tackling bigger issues on their own. This shared responsibility and team mindset is what helps organizations get past significant setbacks and find new opportunities to evolve with industry changes.
Increased Motivation
Having a shared vision helps individuals to consciously or unconsciously become stagnant in their performance. There is a reason why goal setting is such a powerful motivator for people. Without goals, it’s impossible to know if we’re improving and if we’re seeing any rewards for our efforts.
A well-constructed and understood company vision gives some for people to work towards. When feeling drowned by day-to-day tasks or long-term projects that seem like they’ll never end, having a big-picture goal in mind that everyone is equally working towards helps to keep the passion strong in employees and can greatly improve their willingness to extend themselves.
Reduced Turnover and Better Talent Acquisition
While remote working arrangements can be a great change of pace for many people, this doesn’t necessarily protect a company from higher turnover rates. This is especially the case for individuals who might be looking for more structure in their roles.
A unified company vision helps to avoid the classic issue of employees feeling like they’re “left out of the loop” or unsure of what tasks they should be working on. While having a shared company vision doesn’t mean you won’t need to have company leaders pass down specific directions, it can help to fill in the gaps when managers are not readily available to identify the latest priorities.
This sense of structure can be essential when it comes to reducing employee turnover and attracting better talent. When all employees are on the same page, it creates a strong sense of stability that everyone wants and needs in their place of employment.
How to Create a Shared Company Vision
It’s never too late to take the necessary time to establish a shared company vision. Whether you’re a new business or pre-established, there are a few effective ways you can prioritize your business’s purpose for everyone in the organization:
Communicate Your Vision Regularly
Communication seems like an easy task, but so many companies get it wrong. A top-down approach may seem like the most logical way to spread important messaging to the company, but unfortunately, company memos or team emails often fall short of communicating the importance of maintaining a shared vision.
Your company vision should be incorporated into everything you do – meetings, company events, direct communications, and even your hiring practices. It’s important that all employees understand the brand’s purpose just as much as managers and executives. The only way to do this is by making it a topic of conservation whenever possible.
Brainstorm and Gather Input
A company’s vision doesn’t always have to be static. Many businesses reevaluate their business strategies and their core direction over time as industries shift or consumer tastes change. When this happens, it’s important to maintain alignment with staff to ensure that any new direction the company moves in makes sense and is well-received.
One way organizations can do this is by valuing staff input when it comes to identifying and incorporating new company objectives or milestones. This can be done in company brainstorming sessions or structured presentations that allow everyone to contribute to highlighting important values for the company that can be used to reconfigure its purpose.
Set Goals Associated With Your Brand Purpose
As you identify the core components that make up your brand’s purpose, it’s important to keep these at the front of all employees’ minds. This is sometimes easier said than done since every team has different priorities and different day-to-day tasks.
One way you can support this initiative is by making sure individual goals or performance KPIs are associated with helping to achieve the company’s big-picture objectives.
These broader goals for each employee might be associated with performance incentives when helping to achieve certain business milestones or simply associating each performance metric with the impact that achieving it could have on the company.
This helps management teams remove any notion of bias in performance reviews by keeping all teams accountable for their contributions toward the same company goals.
Let a Shared Company Vision Help Your Business Succeed
Your team’s level of motivation is a critical component of your business’s overall success. By creating a shared company vision that everyone understands and appreciates, you can help keep your employees engaged and passionate about the organization while creating a more resilient business foundation.
