What Is a Mission Statement and How Can You Implement One?

Your mission statement should capture the passion behind your brand, no matter the company. A short, powerful summary that identifies the values that drive your brand or business, it often speaks to both the company’s goals and reason for existence.

Some mission statements — like the one that the business social networking website LinkedIn maintains — speak directly to their purpose: “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”.

Others expound on the vision, drive, and corporate aspects that contribute to success, much like Disney’s mission does: “Entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling, reflecting the iconic brands, creative minds and innovative technologies that make ours the world’s premier entertainment company.”

Implementing a mission statement means more than developing a shared vision: it means broadcasting your purpose wherever your brand is displayed. Physical signage — whether a distinctive wall graphic or a subtle graphic panel — goes a long way toward perfecting a workplace well-aligned with the owner’s mission. Quality sign production means more opportunities to broadcast and pursue your mission statement, in front of employees and potential consumers.

Why Are Mission Statements Used?

Mission statements are used by companies to accomplish a wide variety of objectives. As such, implementing one first means understanding the reasoning behind the creation of it.

Common reasons for implementing a mission statement include:

• Guiding Principles, to better describe a company’s beliefs and philosophies;
  • Public Relations, relaying a company’s aims and values to the world;
  • Connection to the organization’s founding, aligning a company’s decisions to its reason for existence;
• Branding, allowing a company to communicate company values achieve greater physical brand exposure externally to potential customers, and internally to employees.

Mission statements help businesses and organizations of all sizes to appropriately frame their goals, and to establish a vision that drives progress forward.

Writing a Mission Statement

A mission statement encapsulates the definition of your brand, its reason for being. You’ll want to write your mission statement only after you’ve arrived at the most simple, straightforward way of expressing exactly what your company does, and why.

Asking yourself open-ended questions while writing your mission statement can help you appropriately tailor your words. These questions can include:

• What value does our company offer?
• What do we do, and why do we do it?
• What makes our customers the best?
• What makes our employees the best?

These and other questions can help companies tailor a mission statement for use internally and externally. Mission statements can and should be used as the basis for all company branding and marketing efforts. When drafting a mission statement, make sure your verbiage is compatible with website use, signage, clothing, promotional products, and any other applications where it deserves to be seen.

Implementing a Mission Statement

Implementing a mission statement means identifying and pursuing channels that allow your company’s products or services to be seen and enjoyed, all backed by the reason why the company exists at all.

Companies should be prepared to stand behind their mission, create an environment reflective of it, facilitate employee engagement and activity around it, and remain open to changes as the company evolves.

Stand Behind the Mission

Mission statements should be as defensible as they are concrete. Employees should be able to understand and stand behind their company’s mission, and it should remain at the very core of your company’s actions, whether you’re building a year-long corporate budget or choosing the music for a company picnic. When employees take steps to embody the mission of the company, the statement has successfully begun to drive decision-making at every level.

Create an Environment Reflecting the Mission

Supporting a mission statement is made easier when companies take steps to create an environment reflective of that mission. This could mean the physical environment, in a building dedicated to the corporate mission and mindset. This could also mean the general mood of an institution, where minds are aligned to accomplish overall goals.

When creating an environment reflective of a company’s mission, company leaders are allowed to reinforce company branding and foster a positive environment for all employees. Cut bronze letters or metal letters can subtly display a company’s name and mission statement onto a wall, or try stainless steel letters for a sleek, modern finish. Affordable pricing and custom signage options make it easy to customize your workspace.

Facilitate Employee Engagement With the Mission

Employee participation is pivotal to the success of your overall mission statement. Integrating employee thoughts and concerns — and even tailoring your mission statement and employee engagement toward causes employees care about — will help company leaders gain and sustain the support of their workforce.

Employees are also more engaged when the office itself furthers the company’s mission. A workplace optimized for comfort and productivity helps align employee focus, and helps workers at all levels remain focused on the company’s short- and long-term goals.

Center Activities Around the Mission

Team activities also help keep companies aligned. Sometimes, this means launching team-building initiatives between employees, to encourage teamwork and shared problem-solving. In other instances, it means leveraging a person-first mission statement to assist the community around you, by taking the time away from the office to volunteer or support a local initiative.

Revise the Mission to Keep Up With the Times

Mission statements don’t need to be static; sometimes a refresh better captures the current state of a company’s focus. Updates to a company’s structure, focus, vision, leadership, or output can mean that it’s time for an update.

Businesses can always look back at their mission to consider their products or services in a new light and refresh branding. As employee opinions develop, mission statements can also be rewritten to better express the current thoughts and feelings of the workplace. With any updates or changes, make sure to update any branded items or platforms that contain the statement, as well as both internal and external signage.