The goal for any company should be for employees to buy into your mission, and be engaged with their work on a more meaningful level than simply doing it for the money.
The benefits are numerous and tangible: staff turnover, for example, can be reduced by as much as 43%, substantially lowering recruitment costs. Profits meanwhile can be increased by up to 21%, and your brand can become something beloved inside and outside of your organisation, extending your reputational reach.
While the positives of a bought-in workforce are tangible, numerable and widely recognised, achieving this can be much harder to pin down. It requires honest analysis, and careful attention to both your leadership style and workplace culture. Making the process of encouraging employees to buy in more difficult is the fact that the UK has an engagement rate of just 10%—ranked 33rd in Europe, and near the bottom whenever global survey results are released.
With engagement at an all-time low, and 55% of employees feeling overwhelmed, there has never been a better time to make a change, improve, inspire and make your mission a meaningful one. Below, we’ve explored the steps needed to achieve this buy-in from your employees, and benefit your organisation as a whole.
Establish a Vision Worth Believing in
We all like to think that our work is having a positive impact on our communities and the world around us. Indeed, 82% of UK employees believe it is important that their company has a purpose, one that contributes to society and provides meaningful work. For many organisations, purpose and meaning are intrinsic to what they do: renewable energy companies, for example, are building for a brighter, greener future for everyone, and social enterprises tie company performance to the betterment of a particular cause.
But what if your business does not directly make the world a better place? What if it simply serves an essential or commercial function that keeps the economy ticking? You could follow in the footsteps of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing manufacturer that pivoted its core objective, and has become a model for purpose-driven business. While Patagonia sells products for profit, it has also embedded environmental activism and sustainability deeply into its mission, creating a brand that resonates strongly with socially conscious consumers and employees alike.
If, however, you are hesitant to adopt a bold corporate objective and redefine your business, you might choose to elevate your business proposition, and demonstrate the value that you provide for clients. A logistics firm might position itself as a trusted partner who can ensure essential goods arrive on time when needed, and an accountancy firm could focus on the financial stability that its service provides to people’s lives.
However you choose to establish or communicate your company’s purpose, it must resonate with your employees. Without this fundamental building block of buy-in, the other steps might fall short of the mark.
Provide Transparency
In any organisation, it is easy for an “us” versus “them” dynamic to develop as a direct result of poor communication, and a lack of inclusion within the decision-making process. On the one hand, employees might feel like they are being left out of important conversations; on the other, managers can unintentionally overlook the importance of keeping their teams in the loop, accidentally blindsiding them with seemingly sudden announcements.
When this division occurs, the workplace becomes a low-trust place in which employees feel undervalued, and switch off from the meaningful purpose towards which the company is striving. By establishing a high-trust environment, you can create teams that are approximately 76% more engaged, and 29% more satisfied with their lives.
A great example of a high-trust company is the supermarket John Lewis. As the largest employee-owned business in the UK, John Lewis gives every ‘partner’ staff member an equal voice regardless of seniority. Whereas an entry-level employee at another company might feel powerless to affect any change, at John Lewis they can contribute towards all of the big decisions, and have a fuller understanding of what is going on in the background.
You might establish transparency in your workplace through town hall-style meetings, anonymous surveys, or regular updates about the company. Essentially, it is by improving your communication that you can also improve inclusion.
Give Your Employees Autonomy
Nobody likes to be micromanaged. It implies distrust and can stifle creativity, leading to substantially reduced rates of productivity. Despite that widespread understanding, approximately 79% of employees have experienced the concept in their career, 71% said the practice interfered with their job performance, and 85% reported that their morale was negatively affected. The practice seems to come from a place of anxiety, whereby managers feel the need to control every aspect of their team’s work to ensure it meets expectations. Our advice is—where possible—to let go.
In place of micromanagement, you can prioritise employee autonomy, whereby your members of staff are free to tackle challenges within the parameters of your expectations. While this might not sound particularly important, nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work. Far from being a carefree joyride for your employees, autonomy simply asks you to remove the training wheels, and let teams get on with the roles for which they were hired.
Provide Clear Development Pathways
According to a Michael Page survey, approximately 51% of surveyed employees feel stagnant in their current careers. At some time or another, we all might question which professional direction we are heading in. Stagnation is the end point of this thought process, and one of the leading causes of employee dissatisfaction, leading to a disconnect between the company’s goals and their day-to-day work.
Personal development can be used as a carrot to motivate teams in the short term, but it will also have the opposite effect in the longer term if training, qualifications and opportunities are not forthcoming. It is, therefore, important to outline development pathways clearly whilst also following through on your good intentions.
As well as providing the necessary improvement programmes, your management team should also have open and honest conversations about exactly where the employee would like their professional pathway to end up. It is far more demoralising for a team member to reach the top of the ladder only to find that it stops short of their expectations, or that they’re on the wrong ladder entirely.
Recognise the Importance of a Work-Life Balance
For many of your employees, the work they do between the hours of 9-5 does not define them. Instead, it enables them to live their life more fully, equipped with the financial security needed to pursue the hobbies that they are truly passionate about.
Accepting this can empower you to implement a range of workplace initiatives and ideas—such as flexible working, gym membership, social events and other perks—that will contribute to a positive work-life balance. Far from being a nice to have, such perks are highly prized by jobseekers, with almost two thirds of people prioritising them above pay and other benefits.
Lead by Example
One of the biggest influences on whether your employees buy into your company’s mission and work is the feeling that everyone is in the same boat, and that decisions affect senior leadership teams as much as other employees. Responsibility—and any consequences of decisions—should affect everyone equally.
A great example of sharing the burden of responsibility is at the games developer Nintendo. The company’s Wii U video game console was considered a huge commercial failure, eating into the company’s financial reserve. To prevent redundancies, which may in turn have had a severe knock-on impact on morale, then-CEO Satoru Iwata opted to take a 50% pay cut. In doing so, he engendered a feeling of ‘togetherness’, boosted the brand’s image, and became one of the corporate world’s good guys.
Nintendo may be an atypical example, but it’s also a company that has survived and thrived for almost 140 years. It’s a result of both the company’s ability to adapt (it once sold love testers and batting machines) and the way it treats customers and staff that it has remained resilient through multiple failures, and continued to experiment and take risks in an industry that often reverts to established norms.
Final Thoughts
Each year Best Companies publishes a list of the top 100 workplaces based on overall employee satisfaction, a symptom of ‘buying in’. It should come as no surprise that the companies that do well in this particular league table are also some of the most successful. Google, for example, has a long history of prioritising employee wellbeing, listening to what they have to say, and even allowing them to put 20% of their contracted hours towards passion projects. The result is that they are one of the most successful and recognisable names in our modern world.
While you might not have ambitions to become a trillion-dollar company like Alphabet, it pays to listen to your employees more. Furnish them with responsibility, offer development opportunities, communicate with them transparently, and demonstrate that you are all in the same boat. In doing so, you’ll find that the journey towards success is much smoother sailing.
