A company’s mission is more than an inspirational phrase to hang in the office break room or insert at the bottom of an employee new hire packet. Mission statements are the heart line of an organization, and the prime purpose that motivates teams to deliver their best work each and every day.
However, in order for an overarching goal to truly permeate company culture, leaders must also bring the mission to life in their own daily routines, in all-hands meetings, in client conversations, and employee one-on-ones. The purpose has to be attainable, practical and drive teams to want to constantly improve – both for the clients they serve and themselves.
At tech companies across Los Angeles, supporting a mission comes in many different forms and results in an abundance of outcomes. While any two are rarely the same, the drive always stems from bringing people together to make a difference in the world around them.
At edtech company InStride, Engineering Manager Michael Ragsdale has found that seeing the real-time impact of his team’s efforts in their customers’ lives drives them to continuously adapt and improve their services.
“It’s incredibly fulfilling to see how a person’s career and life can change when they have access to education through their employer,” Ragsdale added.
Built In sat down in conversation with Ragsdale and Director of Sustainability and Social Impact Dana Trans to learn more about translating a mission into direct action and how uniting teams with a purpose brings about the strongest results possible.
As a team leader, how do you translate InStride’s mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
Our mission at InStride is to enable employers to provide life-changing workforce education programs to their employees in partnership with the highest quality academic institutions. We partner with corporations like Aramark, Banfield Pet Hospital, Carvana and Magna to create education programs for their employees to continually be learning. We envision a future where every major corporation provides career-boosting degrees, certificates and credentials to their employees.
Our mission is bold, but the impact of our work can be seen every day in the stories we hear from our partners and their employees who are grateful to have the opportunity to get a college degree without taking on debt. Those stories drive us to improve our platform and raise the bar. So when we’re looking at our next sprint and thinking about the features we want to add, we think about those learners and what we can do to make their experience better. We’ll intentionally prioritize features that improve the learner experience over other features because everything we do, at all levels of our organization, rolls up into our mission of improving the lives of these learners.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects InStride’s mission?
The truest embodiment of our mission at InStride is our Step Forward program, which gives our InStride employees access to enroll in the more than 1,700 online courses offered by our network of quality academic partners. This means that any of us, from our very first day on the job, can enroll in programs to sharpen our professional skills, or even get a graduate degree, and InStride will cover the full tuition. Access to education is a really meaningful opportunity that we offer to our corporate partners, and it makes me proud to work for a company that believes in its mission enough to bring that type of offering to its own employees.
As an added bonus, the Step Forward program is also a useful way to ensure that the quality of our product meets our expectations. InStride employees have high standards, so if it passes muster with them, we know it will be well received by our corporate partners.
We believe in fostering a culture of lifelong learning where people can advance.”
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating InStride’s mission, and why?
InStride provides education opportunities for companies and their employees, and with that, we aim to create a culture of learning in each organization. We also believe in fostering a culture of lifelong learning where people can advance, and we put a lot of emphasis on celebrating our accomplishments and milestones. Every week we have an all-hands meeting where each team shares what they are working on and what they’ve achieved. The chat box blows up with funny and supportive messages from everyone.
As of this year, we’ve supported 38,000 employee-learners as they earned high school diplomas, certifications and college degrees. Whenever we can, we share stories from those learners on Slack and our social channels so we can all see the impact that our work is having. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see how a person’s career and life can change when they have access to education through their employer. This year, we also celebrated our InStriders who participated in the Step Forward program. It was cool to see our own teammates experience what our partners experience, and we had an entire online graduation celebration to mark the occasion.
As a team leader, how do you translate Inspire’s mission into specific actions or goals for both the company and individual teams?
At Inspire, we’re on a mission to accelerate a net-zero carbon future. We do that by offering a seamless, clean energy experience to homes across the country. As our director of sustainability and social impact, I work with stakeholders to establish a clear narrative around key focus areas such as business emissions, renewable energy generation and social impact for driving our mission forward. From there, I dive into creating a strategic framework based on those focus areas which outline goals, key results and clear cross-functional team accountability.
We consistently reference the strategic framework narrative in so many touchpoints of the employee experience. Every new team member goes through a Day 1 Mission & Impact training to ensure they understand how we make an impact right from the start.
At our company-wide all-hands meetings, I host a ‘Mission Moment’ segment that allows employees to engage with our mission through current events or impact-related business updates. Through education and repetition, Inspire grounds its employees on the steps to achieve our mission and what it will take to get there.
What aspect of your company culture or values most reflects Inspire’s mission?
To ensure that all decisions we make are on mission, Inspire has a set of ‘Guiding Principles,’ or four simple concepts that we’re encouraged to consider when making a decision. Employees are empowered to make sure their actions and decisions are on mission, focused on the consumer, stunningly simple and driving solutions. The framework keeps our team on track and allows us all to ensure the business areas we contribute to are charging toward a net-zero carbon future.
When looking to build a new social impact platform, for example, I leveraged our guiding principles to help ensure that it was designed to accelerate our mission. Through the social impact platform, we aim to provide clean energy access to marginalized communities, build social impact into our core product offering, scale brand awareness, and also create fully ownable content for our employees and consumers to engage with.
What role do your team members play in building, strengthening or celebrating Inspire’s mission, and why?
Changing how consumers access clean energy and accelerating a net-zero carbon future cannot be done in a silo. To fulfill our mission, we must work collaboratively to engage stakeholders to accelerate the clean energy transition. Every team member has a role to play in engaging business stakeholders and driving the collective action needed to bring our mission to life.
Our people team engages our employees and community through hands-on volunteer opportunities at home and abroad. The technology team builds better product experiences for our members. Our sales team makes clean energy accessible to consumers to build that member base. And the list goes on! No matter what position you hold at Inspire, you play an active role in accelerating our mission.
