This article comes from Entrepreneur.

3 Purpose-Driven Ways to Increase Your Company’s Productivity

Here are three purpose-driven ways to increase your company’s productivity and profitability.

1. Treat your employees like partners.

For renowned Hollywood branding agent Lorenzo Rusin, who’s overseen product placement for movies including Terminator: Dark Fate and Martin Scorsese’s latest, The Irishman, maintaining a respectful and professional environment is of utmost importance. “I surround myself with an amazing staff,” Rusin explains via email. “I treat my employees as my partners. At the same time, I try to involve myself in every project I can, while sharing my success with them. They deserve it.”

Many employers make the mistake of distancing themselves from their employees via a complex and intimidating hierarchy. If you own a big corporation, that might be necessary (in which it case it’s the manager’s job to inspire action and your job to inspire the managers). But in the early days of entrepreneurship, it can be counterintuitive. Adds Rusin, “I’ve found that if you spend more time with your employees, really get to know them, treat them more like partners, they are more excited to come to work and far more efficient at what they do.”

2. Create a deeper reason for being in business.

At the heart of running a purpose-driven business is, well, having a purpose, but that doesn’t mean you need to bail on your highly profitable SaaS company and build a nonprofit. It simply means that you need to be in business for some reason that’s deeper than making money. This is a common message among the business world’s elite. Richard Branson has gone so far as to say, “In the modern world, there can be no profit without a well-defined purpose.”

Consider Dallas attorney turned YouTube star Lee Steinfeld, who uses his platform to raise money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or Alex Haditaghi, the Canadian philanthropist who once handed out 1,400 turkeys to people in need. Some businessess state their purpose right on their website. Carrot’s goal is to “add humanity to business and help people regain time for the things that matter.” Patagonia is in business to “save our home planet.” And Lush vigorously fights against animal testing.

Not only will having a purpose provide you and your employees with something to fight for and be excited about, but it will unite you all around a single goal that guides decision-making, which will increase productivity and decrease lack of interest in the workplace (not to mention that it will more quickly attract your ideal market).

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