How to convince your CEO to invest in Employee Purpose – a toolkit

Recent times have brought our world uncertainty and highlighted room for a lot of change. Pressing issues have positively snowballed into positive action plans among some of the world’s leading businesses, with 8-in-10 executives feeling that business can tackle today’s most pressing problems.

Maybe you want to be one of these leading organisations, and kick off an Employee Purpose Program – but you need to get your stakeholders and decision makers’ buy-in. That’s why we’ve put together some key steps to focus on when you’re trying to get a program like this up and running in your organisation.

1. Start with the ‘Why?’ – Highlight the problem or opportunity

In order to get buy-in from your team you need to explain the why behind your thought process. The first step is to work out what the problem or opportunity is, explain it, suggest a solution with a timeframe in order to address it. 

Highlight the broad benefits to the business and employees

Make sure to highlight how an Employee Purpose program can make a positive impact in many ways. It never hurts to spell them out! Here are some ideas, with reputable sources to back them up.

An Employee Purpose program: 

• Increases employee engagement which leads to better business performance —McKinsey reported that employees with purpose-driven work are 4x more engaged with what they do and engaged employees lead to stronger business outcomes.
• Increases customer acquisition and retention
• Creates value for shareholders—Research found that purpose-driven missions can increase company market value by up to 6% over a 15-year period.
• Improves employer branding
• Leads to better employee wellbeing— A report from McKinsey found that employees who said they are “living their purpose at work” have 5x higher levels of wellbeing than those that aren’t.

2. Propose possible solutions 

You may have some ideas in mind as to how you could manage your program. Maybe you want to try and run it manually, or maybe you want to leverage a partner to maximise the impact and participation. Either way, you can offer several options to stakeholders, with specific details about each one. It’s also important to emphasize the pros and cons of each to show your research has been done. 

Connect it to your company values

Maybe one of the solutions you propose tie in well with your company values, for example:

• Team building
• Improving engagement of our people around the world
• Putting our values into action
• Connecting to our communities
• Giving back

Make sure to mention this in your presentation or pitch. 

Connect it to any existing internal initiatives

Or maybe you already have some initiatives ongoing and this solution would only intensify and boost participation and engagement in those initiatives. Make sure to link it to the departments that are working on CSR, engagement and community impact – maybe this solution provides an answer for several departments and initiatives. 

Share your recommended solution

Once sharing the different solutions, now it’s time to share your preferred options and why. Make sure to emphasise the benefits, and the gains that this will have for your company internally and externally. 

If you’re proposing using a tool or platform some benefits might include:

1. Boost participation of our program by giving more options
2. Scale the program to make more impact with more actions
3. Improve efficiency of your program and save program costs  
4. Be up-to-date with the latest trends in this field and be inspired by other company’s successes
5. Improve reporting of the program and measurement of its success

3. Outline the implementation

Now you have shared your preferred solution, it’s time to explain the implementation process. 

• How long will it take? 
• Who needs to be involved?
• What will be the outcomes? 

If your suggestion is to implement a platform, you could explain the benefits, the steps that will be taken to kick off the program and the resources that will be needed. (Your technology partner may even be able to support you with some of these steps.) Make sure to communicate these benefits, for example: 

• Think of focus areas (causes, type of activities, etc) and key goals of program
• Identify partners to support and tools to promote program
• Prepare internal communication for launch and beyond
• Track and report the program results, improve it.

4. Last step: Pitch it internally

Put together your findings in one document 

There are several steps to sharing your plan, they might involve:

1. An email to your manager/decision maker with the initial idea
2. A presentation template for you to adapt to your internal branding

We’ve created a template for each to help prepare you for that process. If you’d like to access these templates, just click on the links and we’ll send them over to you!

Of course, do adapt them to your program and branding – we’ve kept them simple so as not to complicate the formatting on your side.

Good luck, and if you ever need support on the strategy of your program and how a partner might help, just get in touch with us by requesting a demo.