Define your values
To focus your company on a vision, mission and set of core values, first you need to define what those values are. That was the first step in Rubin’s process.
“Our vision is to be a worldwide leader in e-commerce, growing from what was a U.S.-based platform,” Rubin says. “Our mission is to be e-commerce experts that really help our clients grow their e-commerce. Our core values support the vision and mission — for instance, the idea that a promise made is a promise kept. We’re in the business of delivering clients products that are important to their businesses, and we need to hold to that commitment.”
From there, Rubin and his leadership team performed a large-scale rollout of the vision, mission and values to the entire company. It was a task simple to state but complex to carry out.
Rubin uses the term “overcommunicate” to describe the level of persistence he and his managers used to focus their thousands of employees on the company’s guiding principles. In the world of business, “overcommunicate” is something of a cliché, but to Rubin it has a definite meaning: to never allow yourself or your senior managers to become satisfied with their current level of communication. Rubin says you should always strive to go above and beyond your current level of communication.
“We had a big rollout that we did to all the constituencies in the company,” he says. “We had a lot of different materials implemented and featured in all areas of the business. At our last employee meeting, we did, for the first time, a question-and-answer session, realizing the amount of stress and pressure on employees’ minds. That was really well received because people like it when you’re honest and answer things truthfully. It shows why communication is fundamental to the success of any business.”
Part of the hard work of communication is making it sound easy. When communicating wide-ranging concepts throughout your company, you need to state them in a straightforward manner and, as much as possible, tailor the message to your audience.
“In all the communications I have with people, I’m constantly explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing, why we’re investing in the areas in which we’re investing,” Rubin says. “When we went from a U.S. e-commerce platform to an international platform with fully integrated marketing services, that was confusing to people. We had to define to everyone why we are doing this, why it’s good for our clients, employees and shareholders, and constantly communicating the benefits to people. That is what we’ve done to help employees understand the evolution of our business.
“However, with that communication, I’m trying to reach 4,500 people, and within those 4,500 people, you have all different types of employees. When you’re communicating to numbers that large, you need to be sure that everything you’re communicating is appropriate for your audience.
“It doesn’t all get communicated in the same way. You might have a more wide-ranging message for your higher level employees and a more specific version of the message for the employees who are more involved in a specific aspect of your business. The way we communicate something to our overall business might differ than how we communicate, for example, to our marketing services business. We might take another level of detail to communicating with that business than we would to the overall organization.”