How Your Cultural Manifesto and Shared Purpose Affect Employee Engagement

Your employees may check in, but they’re all checked out.

Can you feel it?

There’s something amiss with employee engagement today — how committed workers are to their current jobs and how enjoyable they find their work. The latest polling data from Gallup tells us just how bad things are: A whopping 66 percent of workers in the U.S. are either “not engaged” with or “disengaged” from their jobs. That means they either punch in and punch out with no real connection to their work or have negative feelings towards it. These employees can be difficult to retain.

But what about the 34 percent of workers who are actually engaged? That is the highest that figure has been since the year 2000, after all. While it’s good news that the number is rising, it also means that only one-third of America’s workers feel their 40-plus-hour work weeks are time well spent. We need to do better.

So, how do we keep this upward trend going, and prevent it from reversing? One thing you can do is create a company culture that rallies your employees around a shared purpose.

What’s a shared purpose, though?

A shared purpose is a collective goal your business is working toward. Nike, for instance, has a mission “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” (source) At V/G, our shared purpose is finding, retaining, and cultivating the most curious and enthusiastic talent for our clients and helping them change the world.

Every company’s shared purpose is different — and some might not even be aware that they don’t have one.

In organizations without a clear shared purpose, employees tend to speak in “I” statements: “I lead accounting” or “I set the goals for accounting.” A shared purpose turns “I” into “we”: “We believe that our solutions can help you.”

Shared purpose feeds your company’s culture

Culture is how your company achieves this shared purpose. Going back to our Nike example, how they achieve their purpose of inspiring athletes is by encouraging employees to inspire each other.

Yes, you can have a culture without a vision or shared purpose, but that’s not the kind of culture you want to have. That’s a culture that has simply sprung up haphazardly, with no intention behind it. A culture with no intention behind it can confuse employees and leave them feeling directionless.

A sure sign that your company’s culture has not been intentionally set is if your employees all answer the question “What is our culture?” differently.

Behold the power of a cultural manifesto

If you don’t devote the time and energy necessary to create your company’s culture from the get-go, the culture will form without you. If this has happened, you have two options: Rebuild from scratch, or redefine your culture using elements that are already there.

In both cases, you’ll need a cultural manifesto to guide you. This manifesto lays out your core values and serves as a touchstone for all employees.

If you are rebuilding from scratch, you need to convene leadership to set out these core values and how your employees will integrate them into their daily lives.

If you’re redefining your culture, you need to spend time with your engaged employees — not just leadership, but everyone who has shown commitment to the company. What keeps them coming in every day? What would they like to change? Bake that feedback into your redefined culture.

Once you’ve created this cultural manifesto, it’s up to leadership to fully embrace it and evangelize it to the rest of the company.

Why do we need to do this?

First, it’s just good for your employees. Giving them a concrete goal to work toward (a shared purpose) and a framework through which they can achieve that goal (a cultural manifesto) leads to happier, more engaged, and productive talent.

Secondly, making sure you have a strong culture built around a shared purpose also reduces the resources you expend on talent acquisition and retention.

When you know exactly what you want to do, you know exactly what kind of talent to look for. That means less time spent interviewing candidates who aren’t actually a good fit for your organization, a clearer message to sell to candidates who are, and the ability to create a career track that will keep them engaged once they’re hired.

With a shared purpose and a well-defined culture, everyone wins.

V/G is a strategic talent search & development consultancy partnering with the world’s most renowned technology companies to help them find, retain and cultivate top talent in tech.