Creating a Business Mission Statement That Means Something

The idea behind a mission statement is that everyone working within the business, and all new recruits, will read and understand the mission statement and seek to embody its words going forward. A company mission statement will usually form part of any business plan for a startup looking to make an impact.

The wording will usually talk a great deal about empowering individuals, adhering to a set of values, and delivering a high level of service to valued customers. All of these are no doubt laudable goals, so much so that it’s arguable that a mission statement is unnecessary in this regard; those should be the aims of any company and if it’s being run right, they should already be in place.

That’s not to junk the idea of a mission statement altogether. A well-written, considered mission statement can make experienced workers and new recruits alike see their work in a whole new light. If you are going to put one together yourself, it might be tempting to copy or take inspiration from existing examples that are already out there, but before you do that you should think: “What does this say about MY company? Does it in any way reflect a business that wants to do things differently, or in the right way?”

The words in your company’s mission statement should come from you, as well as from other people who work within it. However, for some guidance on the sentiment and concepts, it should carry, the below are a few worthwhile pieces of advice.

Avoid grandiosity when talking about basic concepts

“A fun-loving environment and a family atmosphere are very much part of our philosophy” is something that most businesses could say. For that matter, it is something that most groups of three or more friends could say - and it could be argued that that’s less a philosophy and more just the way human interaction happens. Inflating simple concepts into something more akin to a commandment makes a mission statement hard to take seriously.

Your statement is your chance to highlight what marks you out as a company, what separates you from the crowd. If you use it to say something like the above, you’re not just missing the chance to make that stand out statement, you’re also more or less inviting the people who read it not to take it seriously. If you attempt to inject undue gravitas into something as every day as “our employees are friendly to one another”, it’s never going to work as intended.

Highlight a readiness to move with the times

If your business mission statement was written in 1921, then it has seen more than a dozen US Presidents come and go, it has survived through a global war, and it has witnessed the world’s population more or less quadruple. There is a chance that it might be due for an update because while it is positive to keep good values in a changing world it is also vital to recognize the ways in which the world changes and be ready to change alike.

For a mission statement to have meaning, it needs to identify ways in which the business will act when action is necessary. It should say something about, for example, the safety and the well-being of members of staff—which would mean that you undertake to create a modern office space that allows your workforce to breathe clean air and - in light of recent developments - to socially distance when necessary. It is all well and good for your business to promise to offer a first-class working environment, but a proper statement will be clearer about what that entails.

You can’t avoid buzzwords, but you can make them mean something

Perhaps one of the most prominent words in business parlance over recent years, “diversity” has come to be a totem in company mission statements. Partly because of the vagaries of employment law, and partly because it’s simply the right thing to do, companies tend to commit to ensuring a diverse workplace. However, that shouldn’t simply mean that your company fulfills a certain number of accepted quotas of employees based on race, gender, religious background, and other specific categories.

Your mission statement should certainly give voice to the importance of diversity, but it should be clear about the reasons why diversity matters. As an example, a team of ten people with an excellent pedigree in engineering sounds like a team worth having. However, if those ten people all come from the same background, have the same education, and the same qualifications, the danger of groupthink arises, and it can mean that the approach to a problem becomes one-dimensional. It’s important to value diversity, but it’s just as important to explain why you value it, and underline how far and wide that principle extends.

Your mission statement should highlight why the company exists

Perhaps most importantly in defining a company’s mission, any statement should make clear what the company’s overall ethos is. You are in business for a reason, and your business has value to the marketplace and wider society. Any mission statement should take as its basis what that reason and that value is. A small business might define its end goal as “a commitment to ensuring that the families of [insert geographic location] have access to affordable and safe housing”. A larger business might define theirs as “revolutionizing how services in the [insert industry here] are delivered worldwide”.

This is important because the guiding principles of your business will play a large part in influencing how you do what you do. If you ever intend to expand beyond what you are now, to invite investment, or to enter a partnership with another business, potentially in another market, it’s essential that people see where you stand and how your aims mesh with theirs. When you can point to a document that sets it all out for everyone to read, you help to make positive change happen in a simpler, more dynamic way.

It should energize, not alienate, your employees

One of the cardinal sins of company mission statements is the use of imposing language that serves to sound impressive but gives little guidance to the employee on how they can live up to the statement. If your statement uses largely empty phrases such as “world-beating” or “unsurpassable”, that’s a heavy responsibility to place upon your employees. It’s not necessarily beyond them to live up to it, but the statement should then delineate what their part in the process is.

So, for a car rental company, a statement should not say “We promise to deliver a world-beating automotive experience to the customer every time” and leave it at that. It should make clear that such an experience will be achieved by providing a hard-working workforce with the tools necessary to make it happen. It should be clear that you aren’t expecting a superhuman level of achievement from employees who have other commitments in their lives, but rather that you’ll give them the wings to fly.

Crafting a business mission statement, and having it mean something, isn’t just something a business does to make it look impressive. If done right, it is a readable document that avoids dipping into cliche, something that changes with changing times and gives customers, employees, and potential business partners the confidence that their part in things has been taken into account. Most importantly, it is something that relates uniquely to your company and marks its place in the world.