Four ways to put your purpose to work in 2021

In 2018 and 2019, we worked closely with a global consumer products company to support its CEO transition. The outgoing CEO had made long-term value a core part of the company’s purpose, which led to consistent growth, strong shareholder returns and increased trust across customers and employees. Despite this positive direction, it was unclear whether the company’s commitment to purpose would be sustained through the leadership transition.

It took collaborative workshops and coaching over the course of nine months to reaffirm a collective commitment to the company’s purpose among the new leadership team. And that process required tackling an uncomfortable challenge: surfacing, accepting, and reconciling a “say-do” gap in the company’s portfolio. More specifically, there were a number of brands within the business that did not match the company’s public commitment to sustainability, a core part of its purpose.

Living your purpose sometimes means making and owning hard decisions. “A renewed commitment to purpose from leadership and the new CEO does not, by itself, guarantee that the company will remain successful in living its purpose,” says Anna Kahn, EY Global Talent Development Leader & People Advisory Services Global Executive Member. “But success would be almost impossible without such leadership buy-in.”

Whether a massively complex global company or a small local firm, an organization succeeds in inspiring an authentic commitment to purpose only if its leaders actually believe in it. That requires leaders to go on their own personal journey and take the time to explore deeply what they — and, by extension, the company as a whole — believe and stand for in the world.

That’s what we found at EY. While we were the first of the Big Four to articulate our purpose, Building a better working world, we quickly discovered that articulating it alone wasn’t nearly enough. We had to meaningfully engage EY people and clients around this ambition, a process that began with our leaders.

Last year, we surveyed EY member firm partners around the world. They told us that they are passionate about our purpose, but that they want to see it more deeply embedded across the firm.“We have a fantastic and still-relevant purpose,” said Demet Ozdemir, a Strategy and Transactions partner in Turkey. But, she noted, “‘walking the walk’ is so critical: what specific actions are we taking to achieve it?” Stuart Chalcraft, a tax partner in the UK, put it similarly: “We need to embed our purpose in everything we do.”

Last August, Carmine Di Sibio was one of 180 U.S.-based CEOs to sign a Business Roundtable statement declaring that the “purpose of a corporation” is to serve all of its stakeholders, not just its shareholders. Reflecting EY’s intention to turn these words into actions, two months later we revealed that our strategy would be anchored in our purpose and built on a foundation of creating long-term value for clients, people and society. As part of that effort, we are actively working to draw concrete connections between our purpose and our actions.

Even today, more than seven years since we put our commitment to Building a better working world into words, we’re continuously revisiting and adapting the approach we take to activate our purpose. Only when purpose remains a priority for all of our leadership we can ensure it is meaningfully experienced by our people, clients and those we work with. 

Leadership engagement is critical but not sufficient. Commitment to purpose must be demonstrated at every level of the organization. That requires support and resources to enable people to fulfill two important steps: helping individual employees identify what is most meaningful to them and empowering them to use this as a filter for decision-making by showing how their personal purpose connects with the organization’s purpose.

A few years ago, one global financial services client found itself at an inflection point, recognizing that shifting global trends in digital, generational and geopolitical arenas required it to think, act and operate differently. The company’s new CEO wanted its purpose to serve as the foundation and compass for reshaping the organization. Purpose would be linked to everything else it did.

Developing an authentic purpose statement and vision for the organization required holding structured interviews, focus groups, and executive group sessions to capture the voices of all stakeholders, including the board of directors. The company then developed a roadmap for activating this purpose-led culture across the organization, tackling not only “big” questions such as strategic and operational goals, but also “small” questions such as whether and how its purpose resonated with individual employees. By involving employees in the process, the company saw engagement improve in its annual people survey, with double-digit increases in certain markets and improvements in almost all questions about whether employees recognized and believed in the company’s purpose.

This company’s experience reflects the opportunity for individuals – and the organization as a whole – when employees have the option to discover, engage, and utilize their purpose and connect it with their work. As human beings, sometimes we process the concept of individual purpose in different ways. Some people think of personal purpose in terms of what motivates them and what provides them with meaning, as individuals. Others think of it in terms of the goals they want to achieve. No matter how you define it, having clarity around your personal purpose helps you better understand what matters most to you. That leads to better performance by empowering you to connect your priorities with those of your organization.

Moreover, being clear about your purpose provides the basis for gaining greater satisfaction at work, increasing your impact and bringing out the best in others. Yet many of us are far more comfortable talking about purpose in the context of our work, and much less comfortable articulating what really matters to us as individuals. This lack of comfort and clarity around the topic leaves us struggling to connect our personal purpose with our employer’s purpose.

Why does this matter? High-performing organizations create environments in which employees can readily connect their individual purpose with their company’s purpose. Research by Harvard Business Review suggests that when people have a sense of meaning behind the work they do, their performance improves. They report better health and wellbeing, are better team members and bounce back faster from setbacks. Not surprisingly, working in an organization with a strong purpose has a positive effect on people engagement, resulting in significantly higher employee energy levels and reduced attrition.

At EY, we seek to bring Building a better working world to life by supporting EY people on their personal purpose journey from the moment they join the company. That journey continues even for those who leave the organization to become part of more than one million alumni around the world. Part of this effort includes rolling out a series of purpose learning experiences, which vary from a foundational eLearning module to quarterly discussions within our well-established counseling families and a dedicated program that focuses on helping EY people discover their personal purpose and create the direct linkage to the company’s purpose.

These experiences are embedded throughout the employee career journey – from recruitment to the highest-level – allowing everyone to articulate, understand and feel inspired by how their work contributes to our purpose. In our experience, nothing brings purpose to life as effectively as authentic stories. That’s why we make storytelling a foundational part of all purpose activation efforts, demonstrating how EY people lead with their personal purpose in daily tasks, whether by doing extraordinary work with extraordinary clients in service of society, or simply enabling them to make more informed, better business decisions that care for the benefit of their stakeholders. 

Conclusion

Many companies are focused on defining or redefining their purpose. The fact that organizations of all sizes and geographies recognize the need to serve all of their stakeholders is itself a sign of progress. But articulating your purpose is just the start. What really matters — what creates meaningful change — is having a clear and integrated approach to embedding purpose across an organization internally and externally.

Every phase of the purpose journey, from leadership alignment and people activation, to customer engagement and strategy, is critical and ongoing. An organization cannot define its purpose and consider its work complete. Purpose has to be activated every day, through every employee, every customer interaction, every leadership statement, every short- and long-term decision and every aspect of strategy. As conditions around us change, we use our purpose to consistently guide us and invest it with new meaning.

Organizations are simply aggregations of individuals, and our ability to put our purpose into action is only as strong as our ability to inspire and engage everyone at EY. While we don’t yet have all the answers, we are making a genuine effort to reorient how we do business and move forward with a commitment to delivering long-term value grounded in our purpose.