Before Kip Wright began outlining his vision, he needed a base of values to stand on.
“We spent a lot of time creating a set of, not only a vision, which clearly articulates what we want to be, what we are and what we are aiming to become, [but] we felt it was very important to pair with that a set of value statements,” Wright says. “What’s important to you from a value standpoint? What’s important to the company?”
Wright, president of TAPFIN Process Solutions, recently walked his staff of 200 at the human capital solutions provider through the process of creating a vision. He says that when molding your vision, understanding your values is one key ingredient. Another key is employee participation. But the vision isn’t complete until it’s clearly communicated to every employee.
Smart Business spoke with Wright about how to develop a vision and then communicate it to your employees.
Involve employees in the process. First of all, it can’t be done in isolation. If you really want a vision that sticks, you’ve got to enlist your employees into part of that process.
When we went through the process of renaming ourselves, for example, we actually opened that up to our employees. We didn’t go out and formally engage in a marketing firm to come back and say, ‘Here’s the three names you ought to look at.’
We let our employees provide suggestions. Then we let them vote on the top 10, and we went through a dialogue of discussing the pros and cons of each of those. It’s important to do that.
When we got down to a set of names, and there were several hundred that we went through, we started to bring that down to a group of senior leadership.
At some point, it becomes inefficient to continue to involve everyone, so you have to start to get some representation for the employee base. That was what we felt our leadership was.
The naming process is probably less relevant than the fact that we do tend to look at our leaders and our directors and that management group and above as representatives for our employee population and ask them to make sure that they’re keeping both our customers’ and our employees’ best interests in mind when we make decisions that affect the company.
