It's one thing for C-suite executives to get excited about purpose. But what’s the point if that’s not reflected across the entire workforce?

When the original activist beauty brand The Body Shop rewrote its purpose, the first question was: how do we get the message from the boardroom to the shop floor and help everyone understand, own and act on our purpose?

Today, host Becky Willan sits down with The Body Shop’s Head Franchise Director for Latin America Jenny Whitehorn. We find out how they worked with psychologists to help a thousand employees discover their personal purpose, and what it took to land the message in 70 different countries in the midst of a global Pandemic. This episode will help you inspire your entire team to live their purpose at work.

Do you want to learn how to build a purpose-driven brand from the company that’s helped some of the world's most influential organisations become purposeful? Download the Insiders’ Guide to Purpose HERE.

Note: At the time of recording, Jenny’s role was Global Customer Experience Director. She’s since moved to the role referenced above.

This week I'm joined by Jenny Whitehorn. Customer experience director at the Body Shop. During her 30-year career, she helped the iconic beauty brand rediscover its purpose and make it something that everyone in the company could get behind. Through this conversation, you'll learn to help your people connect to your purpose on a deeply personal level.

Make it easy for people to know about, understand, and act on your purpose and keep the momentum going, Celebrating successes and learning from failures. Before I speak with, Let's take a quick look back at her career to learn how she became a leading authority on purpose.

But when Jenny left University and started an MBA, she quickly realized that she wanted to pursue her career through real-world experience, not theory and qualifications to enter the body shop.

And she said, you know, challenge yourself and everybody's important. And I remember going home that that night thinking this is gonna be amazing this. This is where I should be.

One element of that work was running a purpose-driven leadership program

And what was key at the beginning of developing and launching our purpose? So first of all, was to very much establish the detail of what was behind our purpose with everybody. So, Our purpose is we exist to fight for a fair and more beautiful world. And just as a sentence, it, it does mean something, but it was about getting underneath that and making it relevant and to come to life with all of the different countries around the world that we operate in.

So over 80 different countries and with all the employees in those countries. So we brainstormed. Hugely about how we were going to launch this, and then how we were gonna make it relevant to each and every individual. And the role that I played within that, particularly at the time, our role was about customer experience, director of customer experience, was how do we bring this to life for our employees in order for this to actually reach our customers?

As well and through a number of different initiatives, so making it very visible around the business, taking a stance from the leadership that our executive leadership team and all of their direct reports were able to take that to their departments, run face to face road shows, and actually explore what that means, not just from a.

Business level and a, you know, business perspective, but actually through to what does it mean for each and every individual. And so the exercise really was through a leadership program that reached all of our markets and our store managers and our executive leadership group all the way through the offices was to.

Start to explore what people's purpose was. And that was what made the biggest difference. That we linked those two things together at a time when we could pretty much deliver that face-to-face. And we, we continued to do it virtually, um, over the last couple of years as well. And tell

And it became, a tool to bring your role to life and become more entrepreneurial. To allow us to think individually, whether you are in sourcing or you are in a store, how you relate to that on a day-to-day basis. So we developed a set of cultural values around that, which was around things like putting the customer first, which many organizations would want to do, but we brought that to life to make sure that it.

It was authentic for everybody within the business. And people shared that. And, you know, it became a talking point across the business from colleague to colleague about their purpose and trying to establish that, but also relating it to our business purpose with lots of detail underneath that.

But personally, people, you know, found great strength in that actually, as they developed their purpose. I certainly. ,

So identifying their purpose and then being able to link that to the company's purpose. So could you tell us a bit more about how that experience worked?

We didn't change it at all for any area or country or part of the organization. So two days we partnered with an amazing. Agency, some of whom had backgrounds in psychology, and we just wanted to almost explode what our purpose meant for everybody. So the two days are very much involved in how your brain works and, and how you begin to learn more about yourself, develop your purpose.

So we did this through several different modules within it. So one is about developing a powerful relationship. Um, which is key to any business. We looked at things like our signature strengths and one of the most interesting exercises within it was bringing along our collage or our sort of life story a little bit, the things that are meaningful to us in our world.

And that was, you know, socially, emotionally, and business-wise. It was really interesting for people to share. That about themselves with each other, um, to whatever level you felt comfortable. And then how that began to relate to what does that mean for your role and what does that mean for how you deal with your day-to-day business?

And also how it interlinks with others. So it developed these amazing relationships within our organization.

So I think one of, the questions that I had was, how did you convince your leadership team to make that level of investment?

We needed to sort of unlock our organization and make this meaningful for everybody in a personal way, not just through written communication and through, you know, launching what might. deemed previously as missions or objectives or OKRs and you know, this was something that was gonna be fundamental and be the platform and basis for everything.

So getting the final sign-off for the budget always was difficult making, you know, realizing how much that was gonna cost the whole business, but, but worth it because when we started to measure it, we were seeing much better results. As a result of it, To be honest, it wasn't that difficult because it grew out of our leadership journey, so probably a bit easier than perhaps the journey for other organizations where this is being brought to a leadership team.

It very much came from that original work on what is the, a body shop's purpose. ,

How much education or making the case around purposes of business philosophy did you have to do as part of that program? ,

So the words in themselves were fundamental to our growth. So there weren't any doubters really in any of that. I think it was just as people started to. The results and the behavior change, and the change in the way that we were working, were the proof points. So with the data, the behaviors, the conversations, and the evolution of projects that brought it to life actually,

We saw it quickly in the offices that we developed as sort of, a language around it. So things like, you know, signature strength and your impact plan. And we kept. Pretty simple that there are a couple of things you can do in your day-to-day that shift from the way that you did it before, the way you, think and your behavior, and what difference you see.

So we talked about thinking behaviors and success and that very simple model, I suppose, or way of thinking and working resonated, and it was really simple...

That they can do. So it formed part of your one-to-ones with your, with your peers, with your team, and within teams. And then customers would begin to see we, you know, we shifted alongside this, We shifted our customer proposition to make sure that the way that we were talking about in behaviors filtered through to our customers.

Yeah. We revised our customer service plan to be something that was called, we call it Body and Soul. Mind. Body and Soul, which is about your induction and then the service program. And it filtered through to that as well. So, Building relationships with customers, getting to know your customer in a much more in-depth way.

And then also exploring decision making in various roles around the business. You know, does this work with our purpose? Deciding that for a fair and more beautiful world? Then things like, you know, air freight, Do we ever air freight something? Then that's gotta stop. Do you know? So all of those bigger decisions around businesses that things might cost us more money, but we are gonna move into those spheres, whether it was in product development, innovation, people.

But to be given this injection to raise the importance of our store managers to share in. Operation with everybody. And it was so interesting because I think many of our office-based teams who were sometimes part of that understood more about what that means, to run a store and to have that direct contact with our customers and that value about the customer first, whether that's yours.

Teams internally that your customers or indeed our customers across all of our countries, resonated with everybody. We're a storytelling business, and the stories that came from that were amazing, and the store managers were proud when they could start to see the results. . Yeah. Yeah.

Is that sort of part of what you're talking about?

If we've got the right people wanting to work for the organization, then the person that's at home and the person that's at work is the same. So you've

So it would be brilliant just to hear a bit about how you measured that, where you saw an uplift, and how quickly that happened...

So, first of all, it has a positive impact on our business performance. And so we began to see that, you know, in some of our stores, the like-for-like sales were increasing. Some of the other stores may be where the team hadn't been through that or hadn't participated in CSAT scores. So customer satisfaction scores were another measure of engagement by the team.

So we do have Glint and we could see that. Just touching base with team members. People were potentially happier, they were more engaged, and they were enjoying their job more. But then the glimpse score reflected that as well. And when we started looking at things like year-end reviews and talent development, those people, were we moving that talent through the business?

Um, and we saw that as a positive move as well. And then recruiting. So we were able to recruit more talent just because we were looking at individuals who. Come in through the door for, an interview or come to, to come to work with us, that had a positive impact on the people that was suddenly much more interested in the body shop as a purpose-led business.

Um, not just because it was the buzzword and it's the thing to do, but because we were living that. And you know, if you ask most people within the organization, there's also another platform. If something isn't working as well, we can say, Well, what, how do we, you know, how does this relate to our purpose?

What else can we do? So the other things fall out of it, you know, our objectives, the way we measure those objectives, and the sorts of targets we set ourselves, but allowing for a bit more. a bit more risk and allowing for a little bit more local decision making and less of the, Oh, I have to keep asking permission for that is try things and test them and much more of an open, I suppose that comes back to trust, that we trust you to be in the position that you're in and therefore you have a little bit more autonomy.

You know, the things that were brilliant and successful, as well as the things that didn't work out. So, How did you navigate that challenge? Were there any kind of processes or structures or, Or was it much more informal in terms of the way that the whole business took on those learning? ,

So all of our business reviews and monthly reviews and all that kind of stuff, that, that was always related back to what was it that we did differently to what we did before that's causing this improvement in whichever measure we were looking at. Um, and then as we started to roll out certainly the purpose-driven leadership program from country to country, then.

The GMs and the members of those teams would start to share that again from country to country. So the, you know, and it's interesting because culturally, obviously, countries are different, but interestingly, people are often the same. It boils down to the same type of desire for improvement. You know, whether it was in Australia or whether it was in North America or Europe.

So I think it was very much more of an informal basis as people were talking about purpose and sharing what they were doing, but formally through our business measure...

So I just, I wondered, you know, if any particular ways helped you ensure that purposes of conversation showed up in the places and moments that do shape culture? You know, like the team meetings and the water cooler moments, are not just the big set pieces, like the sort of the retail season or the sort of the monthly review.

So this really kind of, we used like a lotus flower to show you there are all these different pillars. And awarding things like, um, we did a kindness day, which was a day for you to go and explore something. Be kind to yourself. We work hard. This is an additional day's holiday where you take the day for yourself.

Um, and then something key for very many women. You know, having a menopause policy, some really interesting initiatives like that.

And I know as a director of customer experience at the time, that was a big focus for you. So can you tell me a bit more? Sort of how you made it easy for particular sorts of colleagues working in the stores to make purpose a topic of conversation and enhance the experience that you were offering to customers.

So, That was the most important thing, to begin with. And then as we were developing that conversation with customers, it was the stories around the products, our community trade program, and the work we do with all of those organizations around the world, and bringing that to the fore, not just the product benefit of why you were buying something.

Then the stores being empowered to. Have a local initiative and campaign that would, that would talk to that. So all the different stores around the world could come up with a sort of, what we would call almost like a local, a local campaign that was something relevant to the community, whether that was supporting some of the homeless charities and you know, across the world there's so many different needs from whether it was from India to Australia to America.

There's something relevant on a local basis, which you could have a great big global activity, but when it's local and it's to your town and city, that becomes so much more empowering. And then we started saying to them, you know, it's something that you could share with our customers. You know, if, if you are striking up that conversation with the customer and you're talking to them individually, then tell them a little bit about your purpose.

You know, why you and some of the team's purposes were amazing and. Made that conversation more at a deeper level of, you know, why that customer's come in today. It's not just to purchase mascara or a, a body butter, but something that they chose to come into our business because of the work that we do and the work we've done over the last 40-plus years and will continue to do that's more, more meaningful.

Two, get your leaders to act as role models, ensuring that they're part of the program and can talk authentically about their purpose as well as the company. Purpose. Three, build Believe in your new purpose by showing tangible examples of how it lives in the organization. Remember, the things that you stop doing are often more powerful than new initiatives or checks.

If you'd like more practical advice on building a purpose-driven business with brilliant insight from people like Jenny, download the Insiders Guide to purpose@givenagency.com slash insiders guide.