Jeff Schmitz, Chief People Officer, Zebra Technologies.
getty
When Zebra Technologies acquired the Motorola Solutions’ Enterprise business in 2014, our then-CEO and now Executive Chairman Anders Gustafsson made the strategic decision to define a new culture. He and our leaders had the foresight to prioritize people and culture in the early days following the acquisition. Every employee attended an in-person, multi-day cultural training so they could understand and engage in our new company values, including integrity, teamwork, agility, accountability and innovation.
Last year, when Bill Burns became our new CEO, he established culture as one of his top three priorities. Given the growth of our business, increased diversity of our workforce and expanded scope of our offerings, it was time to define a formal purpose statement and update our values to be more inspirational.
Building a stronger company culture or facing the challenge of aligning different teams as part of an acquisition isn't a fast or easy process. But in my experience, the following actions can serve as the foundation on which your organization can drive future growth.
Defining Purpose
A formal purpose statement unifies your employees, aligning their objectives to deliver positive outcomes to your customers and partners. So, determining yours must be a very intentional endeavor.
At Zebra, our process for formalizing our purpose was a collaborative, extensive effort. We engaged employees, customers and partners with various tenures and backgrounds so we'd have diverse representation. Throughout, we aimed for our purpose statement to have several elements that resonated internally and externally. First, we wanted it to inspire and motivate current and future employees and customers. It was also important that the statement was ownable to our organization and meaningfully distinct from competitors, so it had to be authentic to our company culture. Accessibility and credibility were also important elements. Finally, we wanted our purpose statement to be supportive of our company’s short- and long-term ambitions. With all this in mind, we landed on "Together, we create new ways of working that make everyday life better for organizations, their employees and those they serve."
How To Develop Your Purpose
When you're developing a purpose statement, be sure to include stakeholder engagement. As an HR leader, you play a key role in spearheading its creation, given its connection to talent retention and recruitment. The marketing team will also play a critical role in ensuring the statement aligns with the company brand. When identifying the right stakeholders to engage with, consider consulting those who are driving your performance management, leadership development, culture revitalization efforts and recognition programs.
Ultimately, you want the purpose statement to be embedded in your business strategy and reflect the impact you can make with your employees, customers and partners. Before finalizing your purpose statement, I recommend you ask questions such as: Is the statement credible? Will it stand the test of time? Is it clear and memorable, and is it easy to translate globally?
Determining Values
Alongside the development of our purpose statement, we held a series of focus groups and polls with employees to help shape our values so they aligned with the evolution of our culture. Over the last decade, our company has grown from 6,800 to nearly 10,000 employees. We also have a different generational mix, as more than half of our employees are Millennials and Gen-Zers. This shift, along with the pandemic and hybrid work, has affected our culture.
The focus group participants gave us honest feedback on what aspects of our culture make it successful today and what attributes need to be strengthened or developed to help drive our future success. As a result we aligned on a key set of attributes and received final approval from our executive leadership team who believed we could promote them in an authentic way. Today, our values are more action-oriented to continue strengthening our culture over the next decade and beyond.
How To Update Your Values
If it’s time to update your company values, consider engaging with your key stakeholders through focus groups, surveys, all-hands meetings and other activities. It’s also important to ensure your company values are actionable and embed them in executive leadership messaging, performance management and talent reviews, leadership training and recognition programs, to name a few.
Once you have alignment on the values, your talent management team can train top leaders so they become ambassadors for the value-driven culture shift. Share specific examples—we call them Values in Action—that show how individual contributors, leaders and leaders of leaders are expected to demonstrate the values through their specific roles.
I also recommend launching an internal campaign that includes employee experience challenges to help your workforce demonstrate how they bring the shared values to life. Campaign tactics can include a physical takeaway for employees to post on their desks. At Zebra, we created flipbooks that included space for employees to jot down how they plan to live our values. Videos featuring employees from across your company, describing how they strive to demonstrate the values, can also help engage your colleagues.
Recent challenges resulting from the pandemic, hybrid work and generational shifts in the workforce have affected many companies' cultures. Now is the time to engage employees with a strong purpose and values to reinvigorate company cultures and drive continued success, and as an HR leader, you'll play a vital role in this transformation.
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