You’re the Boss Blog: Helping Employees See Why We Do What We Do

Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

American workers average approximately 2,000 hours at work each year. They work hard for their employers and strive to achieve the goals that have been set for them. But to find real meaning in what they do, and to believe that it matters, they need to understand why they do it.

In my last post, I talked about what happens when employees wonder what’s going on. Now, I want to focus on the communication of company goals. It’s the beginning of the year and it’s a natural time to make sure everyone understands what we want to accomplish in 2013.

If you have not seen Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” I encourage you to take the time to watch it. It’s only 18 minutes long, but it has a lot of impact. In the first five minutes, he explains his theme by drawing one circle inside another that is inside another. In the smallest circle, he writes, “Why.” In the middle circle, he writes,  “How.” Finally, in the outer circle, he writes, “What.” He says inspired leaders and organizations, regardless of size, “communicate and think from the inside out.”

Why: What is your purpose? What is your belief? Why does your organization exist?

How: What is your unique value proposition?

What: What does your organization do?

Mr. Sinek concludes the summary by saying that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” I think that at any organization that is trying to achieve big goals, there inevitably will be members of the team who ask, Why? Why are we here and why does this organization exist? It’s important to have an answer.

At H.Bloom, our mission is simple: to enrich people’s lives. For customers, we deliver living art that brightens a room. For employees, we cultivate an environment in which we help them grow as individuals. Since our launch in 2010, we have maintained three founding principles:

1. Deliver products and services that make people happy.
2. Build a big business together.
3. Provide an environment for our team members to thrive.

Flowers make people happy. We use software, efficient operations and effective training to deliver more flowers to more people. This helps us build a big business. If we build a big business, there will be more opportunities for our team members to take on more responsibility and grow as individuals. There is meaning in what we do, and it matters.

So, with our mission fully defined and our reason for being ready to be shared, here’s how I’m communicating the goals to our team this year:

1. Internal road show: I’m spending three weeks on the road, going to our five markets to communicate the what, how and why in person. While we are able to do our normal monthly meetings through conference calls, I think the kick off to the New Year is worth doing in person in each market.
2. Describe why: Before reviewing our performance in 2012 and delivering our goals for 2013, I present our founding principles and for the first time, our values. Our management team spent several weeks deliberating on our core values and how to communicate them most effectively. I present these five values at the beginning of the kickoff meetings, along with personal examples of the values being embodied at H.Bloom. These values are the foundation for the rest of the presentation. It doesn’t matter what we’re going to do or how we’re going to do it if we don’t know why we’re doing it in the first place.
3. Review 2012: I walk through our successes and challenges in great detail. I’ve taken to calling 2012 “the year of illumination” because I think we learned so much that will prepare us to do better in the coming months and years.
4. Present a theme for 2013: Before outlining our objective goals, I establish a theme for the New Year, something that can be our mantra for the next 12 months. In 2013, the theme is “Good to Great.” We had a good year in 2012, both because it was so illuminating and because we now know how to do things better. My expectation is that in 2013, we can be great.
5. Outline the objective goals for 2013: I walk through the goals for revenue, gross margin, customer satisfaction, market profitability and other metrics that are important to the business. I also have a section for how we will achieve these goals with new initiatives: software we are developing, training courses in H.Bloom University, and a consumer business for one-time floral gifts.
6. End with questions: Being physically present in each market encourages a healthy dialog and provides an environment in which team members feel comfortable asking questions. This is different from our normal monthly conference calls, which tend to be more of a one-way broadcast of information.

How do you communicate your goals? Have you defined company values?

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/helping-employees-see-why-we-do-what-we-do/?partner=rss&emc=rss