I was at the Sovereign Minds summit in Westminster on Tuesday for a panel on team performance. Naturally, it wandered into working from home, and the room split fast – some fairly fierce views on both sides.
One panellist made the case for remote work with her own business: a team of nine, fully remote, and doing brilliantly. Fair point. Then the interviewer gently took it apart. Of course they’d make it work, she said – your team would dial in from the top of a mountain for you. Her business campaigns for working mothers. People join it because they believe in it.
Most businesses don’t have that and I think it reframes the whole return-to-office debate.
What the office is standing in for
If people will work from a mountaintop for something they believe in, then dragging them back to their desks is partly an admission that nothing else is holding them together. Proximity becomes the glue. You manage behaviour by being near it.
Businesses without that belief tend to do the same thing with customers – they spend on advertising to buy attention they haven’t earned. In both cases they’re compensating for something they haven’t built.
I’d go further. Internal belief matters more than external belief, because external belief is downstream of it. Every piece of brand activity a customer sees was made by someone inside the business, out of whatever they understood the business to be for. When the team isn’t clear, that doesn’t stay an internal problem. It ships.
Yes, plenty of brands sell well with a disengaged workforce behind them. For a while. The gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered always shows eventually.
We felt this one ourselves
KISS is a brand studio. Belief is what we sell. And for a while, we didn’t have enough clarity of our own.
Belief was never the issue – the team cared, and still do. It was quieter than that. There was confusion about what to say and what the standard was, and all of it ran back through a bottlenecked founder. That was me. Questions came up the chain because people wanted to get it right and weren’t certain what right looked like. Capable, committed people, checking.
That’s the bit I’d underestimated. Belief on its own isn’t enough. It needs something specific to attach to, or it stays a feeling rather than a way of making decisions. A standard that only lives in the founder’s head isn’t a standard. It’s a dependency. And a dependency needs proximity, which is the office argument again in miniature.
What fixed it was unifying our standards, beliefs and identity into something the team could hold without me in the room. That gave us clear guide rails for how the business operates, and a clearly communicated direction and destination that decisions could be measured against.
“But we don’t have a mission”
This is where most businesses sit, and it’s a fair objection. Most businesses aren’t fixing childcare inequality, and a manufactured cause will smell like purpose-washing – to the team first.
But a mission doesn’t have to be a cause. It’s a destination clear enough that someone can test a decision against it without asking the founder. By that measure, a food manufacturer or a property developer can have a mission every bit as real as a campaigning charity’s. It might be a standard of craft, an obsession with a particular customer, or an enemy you’re fighting – mediocrity in your category, say, or the way everyone else treats buyers.
It helps to see it in two parts. Standards, beliefs and identity are the guiderails that tell people how to operate. The mission is where they’re heading. Guiderails without a destination give you a well-behaved business going nowhere in particular. A destination without guide rails gives you a team that agrees on the goal but gets there in ten different ways, and the founder ends up as the only reliable guardrail.
And if external belief is built internally, a business without a mission is asking customers to believe in something its own people don’t.
The angel and devil on every shoulder
Done properly, brand becomes every department’s angel and devil on the shoulder, challenging people and pushing them to keep to the mission. What does it whisper to finance when they’re cutting costs? To the hiring manager weighing a brilliant but misaligned candidate? To product when a shortcut is tempting?
The real test is whether the most junior person in the business can use it to say no to something.
It’s also worth being honest about the dark side. Mission-led organisations are also where people get underpaid and burnt out “for the cause.” Brand gives people something to believe in beyond the payslip. It’s not a substitute for the payslip.
Worth asking yourself
Is your mission communicated continuously, or was it announced once at an away day? Could your team repeat it from memory? Does it actually matter to them, and if not, what would make it matter? Does it shape who you hire? Could someone use it to make a call without you?
If most of those answers are uncomfortable, bringing everyone back to the office might keep things moving. It won’t give them anywhere to go.
