Can your team recite the company’s mission statement?
If yes, chances are they probably find more purpose in their position than just a paycheck: A 2018 article from Forbes reported that mission-driven workers are 54 percent more likely to stay for five years at a company and 30 percent more likely to grow into high performers.
Successful mission statements are broad enough to include every position at the company and direct enough that team members aren’t lost in ambiguity. Consider a company mission statement to be the North Star of an employee’s purpose.
And they have a tangible impact, too. Missions statements can inspire a mission-driven culture that walks the walk. At these four companies, company mission has impacted cultural undertakings from brainstorming sessions to peer-recognition programs.
When healthtech company GoodRx acquired telemedicine company HeyDoctor in 2019, they were also acquiring another company’s mission. Luckily, the overlap of both mission statements meant putting customers first. Engineering Manager Hurshal Patel said they launched the GoodRx marketplace so customers could compare prices across pharmacies and make their own decision, even if it wasn’t from GoodRx.
GoodRx Company Mission
Company missions can sometimes feel lofty and aspirational, making it hard for many employees to connect that mission to their work. As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
When we began integrating GoodRx into the HeyDoctor experience, we started with the obvious first step of automatically providing GoodRx coupons to patients after they have been prescribed medications. Then, we wanted to see what was possible with deeper integration.
Through team-wide design sprints and frequent collaboration sessions between our designers, doctors, patient support team and engineers, we identified price transparency as an issue for patients who were frequently changing their pharmacies after finding their medication was more affordable elsewhere. Our team overhauled HeyDoctor’s e-prescribing flow so we can now present the user with retail and GoodRx prices at nearby pharmacies, which puts the power of selecting a pharmacy back into the user’s hands.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
We put our users first. As a team, every decision we make and every action we take is in service of our mission. We believe that we need to earn the user’s trust and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. That’s why we launched the GoodRx telehealth marketplace so users can compare services and get the healthcare they need at the lowest price — even if it’s not from us.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission, and why?
Our users love GoodRx from our app reviews. We take pride in our ability to deliver a high-quality experience and are always tuned in to the impact we are having on users who would not have been able to afford their care without us. The reviews really do speak for themselves and this only strengthens the conviction that our mission is not only important but also attainable.
Vice President of Engineering Nathan Broslawsky said everyone can relate to wanting a better financial future — and wanting a better future in general. The team at Freedom Financial Network demonstrates that by joining the Fintech Equality Coalition, a working group that fights inequality.
Freedom Financial Network Company Mission
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
As we explore new products and services, we are intentional about how these products come together and complement each other to address each customer’s unique needs. Our product leadership team meets regularly to share and learn from each other about where our consumer experience and business services intersect and diverge.
This also enables us to adapt to changing situations and economic conditions that affect our customers. As we layer on new functionality and features, we are diligent in preserving our ability to move quickly, iterate and experiment. We are planning and architecting our systems in a way that preserves the ability of each team to own their own objectives and outcomes while contributing to a single ecosystem of products and features.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
The key tenet of our company’s mission is to empower everyday Americans to move forward toward a better financial future. One example is our decision to join the Fintech Equality Coalition. This coalition functions as a working group to actively fight inequality both within the financial services industry as well as in society. This means enhancing access to the financial products provided by each company within the coalition, as well as job and career advancement for the Black community. The coalition believes that as leaders, we must all do more.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission, and why?
One of the key ways we fulfill our mission is by understanding our customers today and imagining what the customer is going to look like in the future. In order to have meaningful dialog, experimentation and iteration, we must have a clear voice of the customer program, research and data to help drive product experiences.
One example of how this comes to life is when our teams get together for a full day of brainstorming and prototyping. Prepped with a customer challenge, everyone comes to the table with ideas for how we might validate possible solutions. At the end of the session, the team is able to design a plan for testing these ideas with real users to determine the best way forward.
As the vice president of marketing at silicon design company NUVIA, Jon Carvill said creating the company’s mission was a result of surveys, focus groups and one-on-one conversations within the team. Carvill said the mission reflected in the company culture was built on an established foundation of trust — data is openly shared to inform decisions.
NUVIA Company Mission
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
There are a few keywords I pull from the mission to help the company and teams stay focused on our overarching goals. The first is “new way,” which is actually what NUVIA stands for in Latin. We have the luxury of being able to approach silicon design with a clean-sheet approach that is built for the future of the hyperscale data center.
The second keyword I focus on is “performance.” This word applies to the culture that we’re creating and the most important attribute of the product we’re building to disrupt the market.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
When building NUVIA, it was extremely important to the founders and executive team that our culture be built on a foundation of trust, where data is openly shared to inform better decision-making and collaboration. These values are a little outside of the box in an industry that is often highly secretive within organizations on future products. It’s an example of how we are approaching the industry and silicon design in a new way.
We see these values at work every day with the way we openly share information across teams and provide an equal voice for all. Our lunch-and-learns (that regularly see more than 70 percent of employee attendance) provide great insight into the foundational areas of our company.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission, and why?
NUVIA is an engineering company and a startup, meaning it is important that our marketing team be highly engaged and integrated with our different functions. We listen and take feedback from them to help to ensure we live our mission, vision and values.
To help strengthen our mission, we’ve enlisted key leaders throughout the organization to champion different aspects. To help employees keep our mission top of mind, we include it across a number of documents, assets and forums. We’ve developed a recognition program wherein employees are peer-nominated and publicly recognized in our monthly all-hands meetings.
At Varo Money, Social Media Manager Genine Lobo said the company’s five core values help keep customers at the forefront of attention. With social media, Lobo and her team can create relevant content that offers financial freedom tips while also showing support and allyship for issues that matter.
Varo Money Company Mission
As a team leader, how do you translate your company mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Varo’s mission is to help improve the financial health of our customers. As the social media team lead, I have a unique opportunity to lead my team to create meaningful connections with our customers by creating content that provides helpful money management tips and creating content that’s relevant to what’s going on in the world.
We do this by staying in tune and leveraging what people are talking about on the news and social media and then connecting those ideas to how this news might be affecting our customers on a personal level.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects your company mission?
Varo has five core values: respect, take ownership, make it better, customers first, and stay curious. Each of our values helped us get to where we are today, which is the first-ever U.S. consumer fintech to be granted a national bank charter.
With this bank charter, we’re able to innovate across a range of financial products to ultimately fulfill our mission, which is to ultimately improve the financial health of the millions of Americans who have been overlooked and underserved by the traditional financial system.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating your company mission, and why?
The social media team plays a huge role in building, strengthening and celebrating our company’s mission by being a part of relevant and timely conversations. We are showing support and being allies to the Black community, creating lists of companies that were hiring when the U.S. saw the highest unemployment rate in our history and sharing ways on how to make a budget. My team creates a wide range of content, while always keeping our customers at the forefront of our attention.
