What makes your company different from others? Why do your customers come back to you or refer your services or products to others? What makes your employees stay with your company and give in their best every day? Or what makes your business partners, suppliers or dealers continue doing business with you?
The answer to all the above questions is – Experience. It could be customer experience, employee experience, candidate experience. If the experience is positive, it leads to happy & loyal customers, employees, business partners. It is not by chance that any kind of interaction with successful companies is pleasant and positive.
What sets them apart is that the company has invested time and efforts on crafting their mission statements and ensured that their values, conduct and culture are in line with it. This is what helps them create consistently positive connections with customers, employees and everyone involved in the business.
What is a mission statement?
In simple words, mission statement outlines what the company does and why. Mission statement defines the company’s purpose and summarises what it does for its customers, employees, owners and other stakeholders. It guides the actions & processes to be followed by the employees & it brings in customers due to the superior experience.
Let us understand this further with the help of an example.
The mission statement of the company, Tesla that produces mass market electric cars is “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”.
It is clear from the mission statement that Tesla is just not manufacturing cars, but helping the world move to sustainable energy by manufacturing ‘electric cars’ that are good for the environment. And that clearly differentiates them from other car manufacturers.
Mission statement of LinkedIn is “To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”
This is everything that LinkedIn stands for. It is a social media platform where people connect, look for jobs, learn and upskill themselves.
Using the mission statement, companies can create the guidelines by which it will function. It provides the clarity about what the company does, for whom, why and how.
Why does your company need a mission statement?
Many companies create their mission statements because it is a part of the business plan or a ‘nice to have statement on your website.
Mission statement as we saw in case of Tesla or LinkedIn, adds clarity to your business goals and helps everyone who is a part of the organisation align with what they do.
This helps create great values and culture that are unique to your organisation and help you stand out against your competitors.
How do you write a perfect mission statement?
Crafting a mission statement that resonates with your company’s goals and values is not a very difficult task. Here are 3 simple steps to help you write your mission statement
- Define what your company does.
It cannot get simpler than this. Just write down what your company does.
For eg. If you are an app-based taxi service – you help people reach their destinations or provide transport.
It is just what your company offers in terms of products or services.
- Why does your company do what they do?
This is the most important part of the mission statement. It exhibits the passion or the sole reason why the company was started.
Mission statement of Google is ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
The mission statement covers the product (information) and the passion or reason, which is to provide useful information to people all over the world. Today google provides information to everyone in all forms – webpages, videos, maps, news, etc.
- How does your company do what it does?
By stating how does your company do what it does, you are laying down the core values by which you will run the business. It is very important for everyone in the organisation to understand and be aligned with the values in order to achieve the goals. ‘How’ can be defined in various ways – best quality product, most customer centric, most environment friendly.
Give some serious thought to this part. It can create the most distinguishing character or selling proposition for your company.
In case of Amazon, the mission statement of the company is “to continually raise the bar of customer experience by using the internet and technology to help consumers find, discover and buy anything, and empower business and content creators to maximise their success.”
Here, they clearly define, what (sell anything), why (to help consumers find, discover & buy anything) and how (raise the bar of customer experience). Their mission statement is reflected on their marketing in their widest range of products & also in the user experience where they use latest technology to bring the best products in the shortest time.
A few things to keep in mind while writing your mission statement
- Your mission statement needs to be understood and encompassed at every level by everyone in the organisation. It should be reflected in all the product offerings, processes, and policies. So do not write it and forget about it. Ensure it reaches the stakeholders and it is accepted by them.
- Keep it short, realistic and interesting. For eg.: Ted Talks mission statement is “spread Ideas”. It covers everything that the company does – providing people the stage to present “Ideas Worth Spreading”. It is interesting, short (shortest, in fact) and realistic.
- Think long term and ensure you don’t limit it to a region or even one product. We want to provide the best gym equipment ever in Asia – this can be limiting and not very long term either. Instead, ‘We want to help everyone achieve their fitness goals’ ensures you can take your company global and also offer other products and services related to fitness.
- Lastly, remember, change is the only constant. Keep revising and updating your mission statement so that it is relevant and continues to represent your company.
Facebook revised its mission statement from “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” to “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” in midst of security & privacy issues.
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