Good to Great: How to Scale With an Outsourced CFO

Your business vision is the heart of your business. It’s what motivates you and your employees to work hard, try new things, and reach out to new customers. But Gallup found in a recent survey of 49,928 businesses that only about four in ten employees even know what their company stands for. When your employees don’t know what your business vision is, or worse, when they hate your business vision, you’re bound to have big problems.

Some of those problems include a lack of loyalty to the business, decreased engagement with customers, gaps in strategic alignment, and a lack of clarity. What can you do to solve these issues?

 

Revisit Your Vision Statement

Your business vision statement might be inspiring and meaningful to you, but if it doesn’t speak to your employees, investors, and internal stakeholders, it could use a revision. An effective business vision statement tells a story about the benefit your business creates. It should also explain the positive impacts of your services and products on others. A vision statement that includes all these things is motivating to everyone involved.

 

Get Your Employees Engaged

It can be difficult to tell whether your vision gets employees engaged or whether their engagement gets them to embrace your vision. Whatever comes first, there is a clear correlation between employee engagement and acceptance of the business’s vision. Connecting with your employees by discussing how their contributions benefit the business as a whole can help you to unify your team and improve productivity.

 

Communicate Your Vision Broadly

As mentioned earlier, most employees don’t know about their business vision. Poor communication is the biggest culprit for this problem. The solution is to use multiple channels to communicate your vision to employees. Instead of assigning certain leaders to communicate the vision, make it the responsibility of every employee to “own” and spread the vision. When message of the business vision comes from multiple sources in the words of multiple messengers, it suffuses the business.

 

Make Sure Your Words Match Your Actions

If your employees know what your vision is but they seem to hate it, consider whether your words match your actions. No one likes hypocrisy, and if your employees think that you say one thing but do another, they’ll have no faith in your business vision.

It takes humility to honestly address this problem. Consider whether you regularly act on the words in your mission vision. If not, do your best to bring your words, actions, and policies into line.

 

Help Your Employees to See the Greater Good

Everyone likes to feel their work contributes to something greater than themselves. An effective business vision does this: it helps employees, stakeholders, and investors to see that their work contributes to “the bigger picture.” Of course, if you’re going to make a connection between your business’s work and the greater good, the connection has to be obvious and clear. 

If you’d like to discuss your business vision with an expert here at Altus Financial, get in touch. We’d love to talk with you.