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level, as people return to work, they will ask themselves: ‘Do I trust my employer to pro- tect my health?’ Clearly, this is not the time for an Arthur Daley, not quite legit, little dodgy maybe but basically alright, approach to health and safety.
Equally, when painful discussions about costs and staffing levels take place because
of the economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, companies need to put their pur- pose into practice by being as fair as possible in the circumstances. Many managers say that they have done everything they can to protect jobs but don’t offer any evidence to prove that. If there are specific examples of things you have done - voluntary pay cuts, cutting management costs, etc. - why not share them?
Those staff lucky enough to return to the workplace are likely to have another question on their mind: ‘Why am I working?’ On a basic level, we are all working to pay the lives we lead, but work has always been about more than that. Indeed, as social bonds to family and friends have loosened, work has become even more integral to our sense of who we are.
One of the most constant human traits is the quest for meaning and, even before the pandemic, that hunger for purpose was directed at work, where we spent so much of our lives. That yearning spreads far beyond the Millennials and Gener- ation Z, the two demographic groups usually highlighted as being particularly keen to “do good” at work. Given the risks and particular difficulties involved in going to work at this extraordinary time, the demand for a meaning that goes beyond making a profit is likely to greater than ever.
Holly Branson, daughter of Sir Richard, wrote in her book ‘Weconomy: You
Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World’, that “social purpose
is the biggest thing to happen to business since the assembly line”, adding that the typical Millennial wants to “work for a company that has purpose baked into
its culture”. She may well be right, but it would be hard to identify the “social pur- pose” behind the dismal service provided by Virgin Trains.
Apple is often held up as the gold stand-
ard of corporate purpose, with its self-pro- claimed mission to “think differently”
and encourage customers to do so. Yet it uses this pitch selectively - rather than on every new product release - disproving the fashionable cliché (especially popular in marketing circles) that “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.
To go right back to basics, if customers have no need for wide-format printing
they won’t be buying from you anyway. If they do have such a need, ‘why you do it?’ may come it into the purchasing process, but so will ‘what’ (the kind of products and services you offer), ‘how’ (are you - or your suppliers - doing anything that could dam- age their reputation?), ‘when’ (can you meet their schedule, no matter how unrealistic?) and, crucially, ‘how much?’.
If you tell customers your ‘why’ story every time you compete for their busi- ness, you will quite probably bore them, alienate them and leave them wondering if you doth protest too much. Many
Purpose isn’t advertising. Nor is it a marketing statement. It needs to be an organising idea
non-executive directors say they judge a company not on what the managing di- rector says but the employee on the shop floor is saying the same thing. So if you’re going to adopt the five, eminently reason- able principles defined by the Blueprint for Better Business, bake them into your culture first before you start promoting them. You need to be sure your approach is credible and consistent.
Don’t get caught out like the oil giant Chevron. In 1988, it ran ads promoting the fact that it had created a fenced-in area at its El Segunda oil refinery near San Francisco to protect an endangered species of blue butterfly. It didn’t cost much - $5,000 - but it was a nice thing to do. The campaign failed to persuade Californians Chevron had become an environmental champion largely because, at around that time, it had to pay a $1.5m fine for illegally dumping thousands of tonnes of pollutants into Santa Monica Bay.
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