Why Employees aren’t Motivated by your Mission Statement
Unless you’re saving lives or ending world hunger, chances are, your company’s mission statement isn’t what motivates your team.
And it’s time to get real about that. Even though crafting a mission statement is an arduous process, leaders often miscalculate how much it can motivate their people, trigger meaningful engagement, or encourage employees to stick around.
In fact, a C-Suite attempt to sell the company’s mission to employees often feels more like a late-night infomercial than the inspirational, unifying force corporations intend it to be. So, we have to face the fact that not everyone who works for you cares about the company’s mission.
Why not? Well, first, employees have so many things coming at them that a company mission lands somewhere near position No. 187 on their mental list of what requires their attention.
And second, as I was reminded in a conversation with a colleague, a lot of people work at very large companies, where the work they do isn’t very different from what they would be doing at another large company down the street.
“Leaders: Within a given industry, Job X is about the same at every large company. So, if you want to attract and keep the best talent, your company needs to make working for you more rewarding than working somewhere else. How do you do that?”
— Curt Steinhorst
If you’re a leader, ask yourself how meaningful your mission statement is in the real world of people working in Accounts Payable, Tech Support, Purchasing, Administration, or even HR. Is that mission a game-changer in their lives? Probably not. If you asked them, “What motivates you to do a good job?” what are the chances anyone would say, “Our mission!” Pretty low.
Truth: Other things matter more. So let’s talk about those things.
I’m not saying companies don’t need to focus on their missions. But let’s step back from the condescending tactic of using a mission statement to convince people that the work that they’re doing is profoundly different or they should feel spectacularly motivated because the work done at “our” company rather than at Company XYZ.
To state the obvious, people aren’t stupid. And when leaders try to pretend that a grandiose or pretentious statement makes an employee’s role in the world more important, most people won’t buy it.
However, there are real reasons people are motivated to work hard and stay with your company, even when their work would be the same at 50 other places. And none of those reasons have to do with the company’s mission statement or designed culture.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is always a higher value to work. It has a fundamental, intrinsic social value, bringing new and more efficient things to civilization and making them easier to access. And work is one of the most important tools you have to change your personal world.
But I also think we need to be honest about this: As companies get larger and the work gets more complex or stressful, it becomes decreasingly likely that a company mission is compelling enough to hold a team together. It can lose meaning with every level in the hierarchy.
So the question is, what can we do to motivate someone to work, or to engage them in the company, if that company’s mission doesn’t materially matter to the individual?
I’ve observed three things that can make a remarkable difference in workforce loyalty, purpose, and productivity.
#1 Does this place contribute to a thriving life? Or impede it?
Does working at your company contribute to an employee’s ability to do the things that matter to them? Is the work they’re doing making the other parts of their life possible – or is it ruining them? These seem like obvious questions, but how many bosses or HR departments genuinely care about the answers – especially if those answers might not be in praise of the company?
Sometimes, people leave a company because they don’t enjoy their work. By that, they often mean that the work has become so demanding, the workplace has become so distressing, or the work processes have become so frustrating that they can’t enjoy the other parts of a normal life. At that point, how motivated could someone be to stay? And yet, employers wonder why they leave.
The point is that both the company and the individual thrive when an organization learns how to help and enable its people in ways that positively affect them across the whole wingspan of their lives. This doesn’t mean a company has to get directly involved in its employees’ personal lives; it means that work must not become so toxic, grinding, punitive, or overwhelming that it intrudes on what matters in their people’s private lives.
One contemporary example of this disconnect is the debate over whether employees work from home. Some employees see being home-based as the key to a thriving life. But if their companies don’t hear that – if they view this set of employees as selfish or demanding workers rather than as people with multi-dimensional lives juggling complex concerns – it can cost the company good employees and give its competitors a distinct hiring advantage.
#2 Can I get my job done? Or does this place prevent me from doing what I was hired to do?
How difficult does your company make it for an employee to do what they were recruited to do – especially compared to the ease or difficulty of doing the same job for one of your competitors? For example:
Salespeople: Are they so enmeshed in your processes and reporting that their focus and
time spent on actual selling are constricted? Is it easier to make their sales quota
elsewhere?
Office managers: Does your company provide the budget and support they need to
facilitate smooth operations and keep the staff productive? Or must they move to
another company to get those resources without having to beg for them?
Team and Project Managers: Can they plan and handle their projects and engage with
their teams, including plenty of one-to-one time and intra-team collaboration? Or does
your company bury them so deeply in emails, meetings, and administrative
requirements that there’s little opportunity to focus on the heart of their jobs before
the end of the workday?
Customer Service Reps: Does your company give its reps the authority to resolve
situations without layers of supervisory review? Are they free to apply their
independent judgment, or are they limited to a canned party line? Or do they have to
change companies for a similar position that comes with 10% more authority and 50%
less frustration?
Technicians and Specialists: Once someone with specialized training accepts the job for
which they were recruited and tested, does your company respect them as experts in
their areas of specialization? Does it give them autonomy in those areas? Or does your
culture favor micro-managing and discourage suggestions, change, and innovation? Will
your well-trained staff need to work somewhere else to feel free (and welcome) to do
their jobs?
#3 Do I want to hang out with anyone here?
For the past couple of decades, there has been a push for companies to have one well-blended culture that spreads itself across everything the company does and all the people under its wing. “We’re one team, one extended family. We love everyone here.” In this brand of thinking, the way to build community is to tie everyone to a single cultural path defined by a policy statement, a list of “shared” values, or the unverified assumptions of C-level executives.
But in the real world, there is never that much unanimity in large groups, or even among small families. (Want proof? Just consider the different views of politics, religion, or sports in any public gathering. Imagine, for example, everyone on a plane.) In the US, authentic culture comes from a thousand directions at once because we live in a society where no two people agree precisely on any list of traits or assumptions. This is one reason diversity is important in the workplace, because only diversity can reflect the actual makeup of the nation.
Similarly, as individuals, we don’t distribute our “likes” equally among everyone or everything we encounter – nor should we. Each of us likes some people better than others, finds certain ideals more meaningful than others, and prefers specific activities over others.
The point is, people in a large organization don’t need to live in a state of campfire kumbaya. In fact, most would rather not. They prefer to focus on themselves, what they need, and what they want. So, instead of spending resources to “manufacture” a company culture, give them what they need to do their jobs.
It turns out that to encourage people to stay in your organization, you need to let them find their own “likes” within your company – practical, familiar, relatable things that have more meaning to them personally than anything to do with company-dictated culture. One of the most powerful of these bonds is workplace friends.
Two or three friends at work – people with whom an employee bonds and whose company they enjoy – are among the strongest reasons employees stay put because no one likes to leave their friends. And no one enjoys starting somewhere new where they don’t know anyone, and there’s a risk of not feeling accepted or establishing worthwhile connections.
Most of all, having friends at work creates a positive form of peer pressure that motivates people to take responsibility and perform well.
This applies to remote workers, too. Smaller groups that routinely interact with each other (even if that’s only virtually) are more likely to create a community than corporate Zoom sessions that switch participants each time. The bonds of smaller teams work because they are the spontaneous, continually adjusting mini cultures with which an employee can relate and connect directly. This localized group is based on understanding each other. It runs on cooperation, trust, accommodation, and authentically shared interest in a specific type of work. All of this matters more to a person’s workday than any carefully composed, focus-group tested, global statement about missions or values.
So, leaders, ask yourselves, do you make it easy for employees to establish friendships with each other? Or do you push employees to restrict their social interactions in the workplace? Do you view casual break room encounters (or their remote counterpart, virtual peer coffee breaks) as cultural glue or a waste of time? Is the concept of friends at work even on your radar as a tool to motivate your people?
Do you hire personable, career managers with “soft” people skills who encourage employees to form long-term relationships with each other, their manager, and their company? Or do you sort resumes to favor “data-driven managers” who see people as interchangeable assets, regard spreadsheets as oracles, and keep their eye on the next rung of the ladder?
Wrapping Up
Do you continually and deliberately ask your team members important questions about their motivation, needs, and job satisfaction? Or do you reserve that conversation for their exit interview when it’s too late to turn the situation around?
One of my staff tells the story of a past job that’s a good example of the need for this ongoing dialogue: A few days after leaving a role she had occupied for six years, she ran into the company president who said, “I just listened to your exit interview, and it made me wish I could hire you again.” That kind of lost opportunity illustrates why these conversations need to be held much earlier and more frequently if they are to have real value.
If you want your people to stay together, work together, and ultimately achieve outcomes together, then spend at least as much time focused on the three questions above as you would on any mission statement. And do it while they’re still with your company and you still have an opportunity to motivate them. Ultimately, your workforce will thrive if it is built on these real-world considerations rather than artificial constructs that fall apart in times of stress.
In other words, don't settle for seeing your company as the "employer of choice in this industry" just because your mission statement says so. Instead, make that a day-to-day reality by managing people according to what actually matters to them.