Engaging With Purpose and Profit: Getting Your People to own the Corporate Goals and Strategy

You want to get serious about employee engagement.

You know that it drives company success. Highly engaged workplaces experience 20% higher sales and 21% higher profitability (1).

But you also realize that it isn’t easy. 59% of European employees and 51% of managers are disengaged to actively disengaged with their business (2).

Traditional HR methods don’t always offer a solution. If they did, the problem would already have been solved. And you may not have the budget to implement them anyway.

Giving your employees a sense of purpose can be a game-changer.

An authentic corporate purpose gives your people a reason to get out of bed beyond the money. This will in turn affect their happiness, loyalty and performance. In fact, employees who derive meaning and significance from their work are:

• 1.4x more engaged at work.
• have 1.7x higher job satisfaction.
• are 3x more likely to stay with their organizations (3).

But living the purpose isn’t always easy.

For the last two centuries, corporate strategies and management training programmes were geared to making money. Doing good was for dreamers, philanthropists or NGOs.

Introducing a purpose into this mix isn’t easy. Processes, mindsets and financial reporting can get in the way. And even if they don’t, many purpose statements are too vague to be actionable.

After all, will Janet from Accounting see how she can inspire customers, drive impactful innovation and craft a more beautiful world?

As a result, McKinsey found that 82% of executive respondents thought it was important to have a corporate purpose, but only 62% actually had one. Of that group, only 42% found this statement to have any effect on the business (4).

This programme shows you how to connect people, purpose and profit.

Through a series of interactive work-sessions, we’ll explore how to:

• Help teams formulate a statement of purpose that can inspire your people and shows the connection between doing good to making money.
• Translate this high-level purpose statement into a practical set of guidelines, actions and behaviours that can motivate and guide every employee.
• Use your statement of purpose to create a movement for change in your business.
• Measure the degree to which your purpose influences and motivates behaviour.

How will you benefit?

After taking this programme, you will be more able to:

• Improve the actionability of your company’s existing statement of purpose, or work with your leadership team colleagues to craft one from scratch.
• Describe how your company’s high-level purpose affects the actions and behaviours of every individual department, function and employee.
• Develop a roadmap to change the processes, measurements and systems that stand in the way of your people’s ability to ‘profitably live the purpose’.
• Implement a movement for change that makes the people in your organisation willing, skilled and able to embrace your (renewed) statement of purpose
• Measure the degree in which your purpose influences and motivates behaviour and continuously improve implementation.

What will you learn and practice?

This 4-session programme is highly interactive. It introduces a practical framework for action which you will learn by applying it to your own organisation. MODULE 1

Purpose and business

• No one gets out of bed to move a KPI: The importance of purpose to employee engagement.
• Best and worst practices in purpose-driven employee engagement.
• Why many purpose statements remain words without action.

MODULE 2

The purpose canvas

• Connecting purpose – profit & (employee) passion.
• CASE: The Insurance Company – from scoring to caring.
• Application: Applying the purpose canvas to your business.
• Group discussion: The purpose canvas work and insights.
• Getting started: The right way to put purpose on the leadership agenda.
• (Re-)building a purpose statement as a cross-functional team.

MODULE 3

From statement to action

• Connecting the general company purpose to the job of every employee.
• Ensuring that every team is willing, skilled and able to make the company purpose, their own.
• Application: Connect your purpose canvas to one or more departments in your company.
• Group discussion: Individual departments and the purpose canvas.
• Workshop designs to let employees self-discover the job’s purpose (rather than telling them).
• On governance: how to introduce your purpose to the organization.

MODULE 4

Purpose-driven transformation

• How transformations really work. A conversation about preferential attachment, exponentiality, social dynamics and risk of a burning platform.
• The transformation canvas: building a movement for change.
• Application: Prototype a first transformation canvas for your business.
• Group discussion on individual transformation canvases.
• Measuring the impact of your purpose efforts on engagement, motivation, working style, …
• Helping leadership teams to deal with practical purpose-profit disconnects.
• You will get it wrong: building a mindset for experimentation & improvement.

MODULE 5

Implementing your purpose engagement plan

• Doing a purpose scan in your business.
• Create a roadmap for purpose-based engagement (or transformation).
• Position HR as the business partner for engagement through purpose.

PRE AND POST SELF-ASSESSMENT

To truly tailor your experience and ensure you’ll get the maximum value of any new insights, the programme’s content will be reinforced with two self-assessments:

• Before the first programme session, you’ll evaluate how your business lives its purpose today.
• At the end of the programme, you’ll describe how you would like your company to operate in the future.

Combined with the contents of the programme, these two measurements give you a first starting point to measurably improve the impact of your corporate purpose on your employee engagement.

OPTIONAL SUPPORT

• For those interested, two optional implementation reviews can be organized to discuss progress and longer-term achievements (which can be part of a third measurement that compares your desired future with your current reality).
• MCE experts can provide personalized coaching to help you apply the insights and frameworks from the programme in your business.
  
• A customized version of the programme can be delivered to inspire your HR teams or help them engage your people with the purpose of your business.
• In case you want truly in-depth support, our specialists and trusted partners are available to provide hands-on assistance in bringing your company's purpose to life.