Gren Paull, CEO of Lilli, takes a look at the importance of a team having a shared purpose and values.
The interplay between building value and acting on business values has become more acute during the pandemic. Covid has, for instance, placed an enormous magnifying lens on the ethics of pharmaceutical companies and the equity of global vaccination programmes. At the same time, rapidly-implemented lockdowns surfaced corporate attitudes to mental wellbeing, with some industries experiencing a step-change in approaches and policies aimed at better supporting employees.
When the COP26 climate conference finally took place last year, the debate about values extended to sustainability. Would senior executives, for example, still jet around the world, or would their new values dictate a shift to Zoom meetings instead? How would organisations address questions of biodiversity, human rights and modern slavery?
In the UK, this is becoming embedded into everyday operations, led by organisations such as Business for Health, a coalition of socially responsible employers endorsed by the government. They have drafted a Business Framework for Health, which explicitly aims to make the once-invisible “H for health” part of ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals. The aim is to maximise the contribution businesses make to health more widely, reducing inequalities and increasing life expectancy. In January this year, for example, high-profile asset manager Aviva Investors showed how it might be done, warning companies that they should deliver transparent progress across this expanded definition.
But for those at the helm of a business, this can be treacherous ground. Unilever chief executive Alan Jope, has, for example, come under fire from investors for putting too much emphasis on sustainability. His requirement for brands to have a purpose has led to the questioning of what this means for mayonnaise.
Set aside scepticism – we need purpose-driven businesses
It’s easy to be sceptical about this push for values to be inculcated into business practice and the measurement of outcomes. But I have no hesitation in saying that this should be the way forward in developing the future of business by putting purpose front and centre. The whole world is becoming more purpose-driven, which is reflected in the way many Millennials now expect their employers to fulfil a useful purpose within society and to make a profit, without inflicting damage. Many people want to have an impact on more than just the bottom line.
Questions of purpose can often be tough, demanding a strong steer from the top, but there must be a role for the wider voice of the team in determining an organisation’s values. Whatever the purpose is, it must be authentic and people in a business must genuinely want to stand behind it in order to fulfil it. This is why it’s so crucial to build a team culture full of like-minded people who share your passion. By creating an organisation aligned on the same purpose and values, you’ll bring your team on the journey with you, because if people are just going through the motions, the outcomes will be weaker. If your team is not fully on board or fails to share the purpose, then employees will be less committed, creative or productive. Once an organisation has discovered its shared values and knows what it wants to achieve, however, everyone works in the same direction to truly create something special that can have a real impact.
Values equal commitment, enthusiasm, productivity
In the case of the business I lead - Lilli - we have a team that is unified in its passion and commitment, even though we recruited entirely remotely due to the pandemic and were unable to meet up as a team for many, many months. Instead of having a team that gets the ‘Sunday night blues’, I receive texts and emails from colleagues who are so passionate about their work that they can’t delay until Monday to tell me about a new idea they have or a new initiative that they want to pursue.
It is this enthusiasm that allows us to continue to innovate. We work in the healthcare technology sector, providing remote monitoring software that allows elderly or vulnerable people or those with long-term health conditions to lead more fulfilled lives by staying in their homes for longer. We have an organisational culture that communicates not only the strength of our proposition with our customers but also our passion for improving the quality of life for an ageing population and shows our commitment to transforming the landscape of the health and social care sector for the better.
The wider benefits to society
As CEO, it is hugely important for me to work with businesses that are about more than just revenues and returns to shareholders, but also have a wider societal benefit. Achieving this while being successful is really what enthuses me. Through a combination of instinct, experience and intelligence, businesses can assemble teams that truly understand the challenge they are addressing and through a culture of belief and a laser focus, they can work to find the solution. In our case, it’s about collaborating better to create the technology that is going to help and make a real difference to vulnerable people’s lives.
Values also matter to us because ours is a tech business working in an area where ethics are important. We use behavioural analytics, training machine learning models to enable more personalised care. Anyone working in any branch of artificial intelligence such as machine learning needs the right values to avoid biases and in our case – to eliminate any possibility of service users being monitored by overly invasive technology.
We all should want to build and drive successful businesses that create value in new ways or through unparalleled quality and service delivery.
Yet how we create value should always map on to a shared set of values. If we have the right values and act on them every day, we generate true long-term value for wider society while building prosperous businesses that deliver for employees, shareholders, customers and service users.
