Starred's mission is to improve people's working lives by giving them a voice.
Feedback lets you know how to make your employees and candidates happy, in an age where hiring and retaining star talent is the key to success.
Mission statements need to be ambitious. They shouldn't have an end-goal.
As a company, you shouldn't ever be finished with a mission.
At the same time it needs to empower real, tangible goals for what a company builds and sells.
When we wrote this we wanted to make sure that it emphasised a few things:
Feedback is a two-way street. It's about listening, and with this mission, we're making it clear that there was something broken in the way companies dealt with feedback.
Better companies are better listeners. With this mission, we make an explicit link between feedback and listening. Giving feedback shouldn't feel like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea and hoping for the best. No, giving feedback needs to start real conversations where a company comes back and says, "here's what we did." A good mission is self-evident, and it's self-evident that this mission is a good thing - conversations need empowering, and conversations between businesses and their people in the digital age could certainly do with a boost.
It's important to value your People Experience, from hire to retire. Talent is your best asset, and it can make or break your company's success. This is why you should pay attention to your candidates' perceptions and your employees' needs.
The mission isn't tied to a specific term like 'Net Promoter Score', 'churn' or 'retention' - sure, these terms are instrumental to working with feedback - but they're the how, not the why. Those terms also age, and not like a fine wine. They're replaced by new terminologies, new metrics, new hypes. Our mission grows with us.
The actual 'why' of what we do is the eternal principle that companies who do a better job of listening to their people solve issues better and can expect increased loyalty and spending - in other terms, feedback fuels growth. It's well-established by now that 'good profit' pays off better long term than 'bad'/ short term profit. Whether it's customers, candidates or employees - feedback needs to work for them. Loyal customers spend more. Happy, engaged employees work hard and push you forward on your mission. Candidates who have a great experience applying for your roles refer you more candidates. Making feedback better for the companies who need to work with the data is equally important. That means we want to make it as easy as possible for a company to get to the root cause - their own 'why' - of why the feedback they receive is the way it is. What can be improved? What comes first? Who needs to see this feedback? These questions come to the fore in what Starred does.
Our R&D team translated the overall mission into product terms:
We want to build the world's best software to create, distribute and analyze feedback.
Our salespeople, marketing and customer happiness teams deal with the customer-facing mission daily. It's the data-driven story they sell, and it's brought to life by our products. Starred R&D enables the mission. As a Starred user, you create feedback experiences - engaging respondents to open your invite and then give feedback, doing so at scale with automation - that's distributing - and analyzing feedback so you can do that better job of listening and acting.