At the 2012 Electrolux annual management summit, CEO Keith McLoughlin shared the company’s new Purpose – a single sentence and four corresponding focus areas – which explain, in a nutshell, why the company is in business.
The Purpose – make a positive everyday difference in people’s lives and for our planet – is a straightforward message. It highlights the value Electrolux creates and the difference employees are striving to make, both today and moving forward.
But, the real success of the Purpose will only come about if the message resonates and is brought to life locally amongst Electrolux line managers and employees.
Once CEO Keith McLoughlin announced the Purpose, a format was developed to introduce the Purpose company-wide. The goal is to engage people, and empower them. The Purpose goes beyond the company’s drive to be financially profitable by encouraging sustainable living. But, the real success of the Purpose will only come about if the message resonates and is brought to life locally amongst Electrolux line managers and employees.
A two-hour workshop that encourages collaboration is designed to be carried out by line managers to assist in further engaging with their teams.
And the company’s intranet now has a special community set-up for defining the Purpose through videos and text and where the outcome of every session is shared with the rest of the organization. Most importantly, workshop training materials are available in a variety of local languages.
Feedback from the Purpose pilot workshops was very positive, with employee engagement averaging 4.5 on a 5-point scale. Now that training materials are widely available, the company will measure the number of workshops conducted and introduce measurements for purpose awareness and engagement in the regular employee survey.