Mission, Purpose & Values - personal experience

The Mission, Purpose and Values of an organization set the direction, energy and tone. That’s why it’s important to understand how they’re landing with your employees and how they feel towards them. Now that you’ve identified this as the core area to focus on, this survey template includes questions which provide deep insight into how your employees personally experience the Mission, Purpose and Values of your company, helping you to direct where the focus for future investments needs to be.

Customizing your survey

This survey is short and sweet and the items provide a deep insight into how you can help your people better experience with your purpose, mission and values. This will make them feel more connected to the wider goals of your business and encourage motivation.

Food for thought

• This survey template focuses on employees personal experience. The questions are worded in such a way that employees are describing how they feel within themselves, representing their own individual levels of engagement.
• This survey is quite distinct to the ‘Company Culture’ template on the same topic which is more focused on the employee’s wider views and their observation outside of their own experience within their working environment. These wider views someone has based on what they observe are less likely to change from day to day. Employee engagement, from personal experience, however, is likely to fluctuate depending on what’s happening at your company and how it directly impacts individual employees.
• If you’re more interested in shifting the culture and experience employees have, use the ‘Mission, Purpose and Values - Company Culture’ survey template. If you’re more interested in how your employees are feeling based on their personal experience, use this survey template.
• When setting up your survey, you can choose to make the survey anonymous or open. The benefit of anonymized data is people can feel more comfortable sharing their honest opinion and it’s probable that you’ll see higher take up. However, it means we’re only able to provide you with overall data which is not personally identifiable. If you want anonymity but also want to identify trends in certain groups, we suggest sending the survey as ‘Anonymous’ but adding in relevant questions about location, department etc to the template to get a more detailed breakdown around the results. It is best to add these questions as a drop down list and to make the questions optional as an identifiable group with less than 4 members cannot be classed as anonymous. Keep in mind – if you ask too many identifying questions, you might make it possible to identify individuals. Only ask the questions you really need to!

What to do with the results?

Ideally, you’ve already taken some considerable action with regard to achieving alignment to the Mission, Purpose and Values at the individual level. This template allows you to go deeper to understand some of the key drivers underpinning the engagement of your employees. Like with any data, it provides a starting point for some honest discussion about what can be done. Ensure that teams meet to discuss their results soon after they receive them. This increases the relevance of the data and makes it far more actionable. When facilitating any action planning session, make sure that you keep the team focused on what is within their control to change. Too often teams can get hung up on external factors because it’s easier than taking responsibility for the situation within the team. If you want real change to occur, you need to get real with each other first!

If you’re finding that your results aren’t improving then start working with individuals around what their personal Mission, Purpose and Values are. Often, when we fail to align ourselves to something, we haven’t connected to it within ourselves yet.