My HR Guy's Guide to Company Mission, Vision, and Values

Business consultants and coaches often recommend developing phrases and concepts to help communicate to your employees and customers what your company “is all about.” These are often referred to as your company’s Mission, Vision, and Values. The goal is to effectively communicate key organizational priorities so your employees can best represent the brand.

So what's the right way to approach this? There’s not much benefit to downloading a mission statement off the internet or asking AI to generate one for you. For a mission, vision, or values to be effective, you must put in the sweat, tears, and hard work. They must be something that YOU believe in and support, or they’ll never be reflected in your employees’ actions. You and the leadership team should wrestle with every part to make sure you agree with them before you ask anyone else to follow them.

What exactly are a mission, vision, and values?

Mission

Your mission is how you view the company’s purpose in the community, the reason for your company’s existence. The mission is a clear statement of the need that your company is designed to solve. So the first step is identifying the need. The second step is laying out how your company is the best to solve to meet that need. The hard task in writing a mission is to keep it short, since the need and your solution should be no more than 1-2 sentences combined. Your mission statement should be something that your employees (and you…) can memorize and recite on command.

Vision

A vision is how you see the company’s future. It is a BIG dream to let everyone know where your company is headed. The company can work towards this dream one step at a time, and one day achieve a level of greatness. A vision statement probably doesn't sound as achievable as a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual goal, and that’s fine – the vision is a DREAM of what the future can be.

Values

Your values represent goal posts that your employees should strive for. They’re the benchmarks against which behavior should be judged, the standards of conduct. Values can be seen as workplace virtues, and often include concepts like integrity, customer service, expertise, attention to detail, or compassion. How do you want your employees to behave? Those are your values. The exact number can vary, but we’ve found that 4 – 8 is normally the right number. Each value should be clearly defined, with examples, so that your employees know what they mean in the context of your company.

Once you’ve developed your mission, vision, and values, you need to implement them or they'll just be words on paper. They should be discussed with your team frequently. They should be listed in your employee handbook and used during company meetings, performance evaluations, announcements about new company strategy, and anywhere else you can incorporate them. The more that management relies on these concepts, the more your employees will recognize and identify them as integral to what your company is about.

If you put time and effort into designing any or all of these for your company, you'll see huge results as they help you and your employees make decisions more effectively. These concepts will help define your brand, and in turn will help your employees communicate your brand to your customers – if you’ve developed them properly and communicated them well.