Building An Employee Relations Policy Starts With A Sound Mission Statement

Psychology research indicates the chances of success are much greater for small business owners if you develop and maintain a clearly defined vision for your employees to follow. This is also your mission statement. If you don’t have one yet, I suggest you develop one and use it as part of your employee relations strategy.  

It's not unusual for a business owner to scratch his or her head these days and ask: "How do I get my people to understand what we're trying to accomplish here?"  The mission statement will answer this question for everyone.

As a small business owner, developing a good sound mission statement is the basic building block you need to establish your employee relations policy. Employees today want to feel good about where they work and want to know that they are contributing to a business that actually stands for something other than the almighty dollar. As Simon Sinek said, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” 

Building a good mission statement is not that difficult. You can make it as long or as short as you want it to be. Here are a few examples:

American Express: “At American Express, we have a mission to be the world’s most respected service brand. To do this, we have established a culture that supports our team members, so they can provide exceptional service to our customers.”

Honest Tea: “Honest Tea seeks to create and promote great-tasting, healthier, organic beverages. We strive to grow our business with the same honesty and integrity we use to craft our products, with sustainability and great taste for all.”

IKEA: “At IKEA our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products a prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”

There are many websites around to help you fine-tune your mission statement. Two websites that I’ve used to help me develop mission statements are bplans.com and missionstatements.com.