Building a business with purpose comes down to five practical steps: consistently communicating the company’s vision, getting marketing and HR to jointly own how that purpose reaches employees, holding managers accountable for driving the culture day to day, sharing real stories of the business’s impact, and being willing to have hard conversations when someone’s behaviour contradicts the purpose. Sylvia Schutte, founder and managing director of Johannesburg marketing agency Stratitude, built this framework around a single question she asks her own team constantly: why are we doing this?
Why does asking “why are we doing this” change how a team works?
Schutte’s premise is that most employees can tell you what task they are doing, a social media post, a client report, an invoice, but far fewer can explain why that task matters to the business’s larger purpose. When a leader consistently connects daily tasks back to a bigger reason, the “how” of getting the work done well tends to follow naturally, because people understand what the work is actually in service of.
The reverse is also true. Employees who cannot connect their work to a purpose they personally value tend to disengage, treating their role as a series of disconnected tasks rather than a contribution to something they care about, a pattern Gallup’s long-running workplace research has repeatedly linked to lower productivity and higher staff turnover.
How do you communicate a company vision so it actually sticks?
Consistency beats a single well-crafted announcement. The vision, brand values and aspirations of the business need to be defined collaboratively with employees, not handed down, and then referenced repeatedly across the campaigns, decisions and communications that follow. A purpose statement in an onboarding pack that is never mentioned again functions as decoration, not culture.
Why should marketing and HR work together on internal communication?
Most businesses invest significant effort in how marketing communicates the brand externally to customers, while internal communication to employees gets treated as HR’s separate, lower-priority job. Schutte argues these should be the same function pointed in two directions: employees need to be exposed to the brand’s purpose and culture from their first day and throughout their time at the company, using the same clarity and consistency a good marketing campaign would demand externally.
What role do managers play in keeping a company’s purpose alive?
Senior leadership can define a vision, but it is line managers who translate that vision into daily behaviour, because they are the ones in the room when a decision has to be made that either reflects the stated purpose or quietly contradicts it. People find genuine meaning at work when they can see a clear connection between what they value and what they spend their time doing, and managers are best placed to draw that connection explicitly rather than assuming employees will make the link themselves.
Why do impact stories work better than financial results for engaging employees?
Businesses are generally comfortable sharing revenue figures, growth numbers and other financial data with their teams, but Schutte’s experience is that human stories, a client whose business was genuinely helped, an employee whose role changed someone’s outcome, land far more powerfully with employees than any spreadsheet. Bringing clients or beneficiaries in to speak directly to your team turns an abstract purpose statement into something concrete people can point to.
Why is addressing behaviour that contradicts your culture non-negotiable?
The hardest version of this is a high-performing employee whose behaviour does not reflect the company’s stated values. Leaders who let that slide, because the person’s output is valuable, send an unmistakable signal that the culture only applies selectively. That signal spreads faster through a team than any positive communication about purpose, which is why difficult conversations about misaligned behaviour need to happen even when they are commercially uncomfortable.
How do you know if your business’s purpose is more than a marketing slogan?
Ask your employees directly whether they know the business’s purpose, and more importantly, whether they can explain how their specific role contributes to it. A gap between leadership’s confidence in the company’s stated purpose and employees’ actual ability to articulate their own connection to it is the clearest sign the purpose has not moved beyond a slide in a strategy document.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a company’s purpose and its mission statement?
A mission statement typically describes what the business does. Purpose describes why it exists and what change it is trying to create, and works best when it connects to something employees can personally value, not just a marketing message aimed at customers.
How often should a company revisit or restate its purpose?
There is no fixed schedule, but major milestones, a significant change in strategy, size or leadership are natural points to check whether the stated purpose still reflects what the business actually does and whether employees still connect with it.
Can a small business with a handful of employees benefit from a formal purpose exercise?
Yes, arguably more directly than a large company, since a small team can define and revisit its purpose through direct conversation rather than a formal internal communications campaign, and misalignment is easier to spot and correct early.
What should a leader do when a top performer’s behaviour contradicts company values?
Address it directly rather than overlooking it because of their output. Allowing an exception for high performers undermines the culture for everyone else and is one of the most common ways a stated purpose loses credibility internally.
How do you measure whether employees have bought into the company’s purpose?
Ask them directly, individually, whether they can articulate the business’s purpose and their own role in it, rather than relying only on whether they can recite a slogan from an onboarding document.
A useful practical test is to ask a handful of employees from different levels of the business, not just the team closest to leadership, to explain in their own words why the company does what it does. A wide gap in the answers, or answers that only describe a job function rather than a purpose, is a clearer signal than any engagement survey score that the purpose has not yet reached beyond the people who wrote it.
Further reading:
Originally published in February 2020. Updated September 2026 to confirm Sylvia Schutte’s agency, Stratitude, remains active as AMIN Worldwide’s South African member, and to add more detail on how each of the five steps works in practice. Verify current agency details directly with Stratitude.
