Purpose starts with Culture

Having a clear purpose and communication is a significant step towards building long-term relationships with employees, customers, and society as a whole. To be real, the purpose must be based on a culture focused on people.

Promoting the development of people is essential to the business, achieving goals and customer satisfaction. Satisfied employees create better solutions, promote a healthy environment and greater prosperity for the company. A study developed by the Social Market Foundation identified that happy employees are up to 20% more productive than unhappy employees. When it comes to salespeople, happiness has an even more significant impact, increasing sales by 37%.

Happy workers also generate a positive image for organizations: Stock prices for Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” rose 14% year-over-year from 1998 to 2005, while non-listed companies only registered a 6% increase. Just like the journey to identify a purpose, there is no recipe ready to create and promote a company’s culture, but there are tools that help teams achieve high performance and satisfaction.

A working model known as process design developed by Swedish Defence University and used by companies such as Google and Spotify highlights the importance of thinking about the process (how) as well as the content (what) to be developed in a given project or work, as shown below.

At each project, the team reflect and should have a clear vision about the entire journey, from the reason to the expected final result:

• Why: What is my goal or purpose with this initiative?
• Content: What will be developed, and what skills are needed?
• Process: How will we work to achieve the objectives?
• Where: what is the desirable outcome?

Focusing on the process is necessary to keep employees engaged and create a better way for people to work together. Many times companies end up not focusing on their teams, only on deliveries and this is increasingly questioned in a context in which young people mainly look for work to be done. For this, they increasingly seek identification with corporate values.

According to Quinn and Thakor (2018), the purpose reflects something more aspirational than economic exchanges: “it explains how the people involved with an organization are making a difference, gives them a sense of meaning, and draws their support”.

Therefore, the purpose is essential to gain life inside and outside the company, inspiring not only but especially the employees who see in it the truth of the company they are part of and can happily share it with the world.

by Larissa Menocci and Luiza Arcuschin — Dream Facilitation