By: Orange County Administration
As we embark on our journey to build the best version of our Orange County team, it is necessary to take a step back to ensure we have a good handle on our mission, vision, and values. You might ask why we should do this, and what exactly are mission, vision, and values? Here ’ s a brief explanation.
A mission statement is a concise explanation of the organization's reason for existence. It describes the organization's purpose and its overall intention. The mission statement supports the vision and serves to communicate purpose and direction to employees, customers, and other stakeholders.
A vision statement looks forward and creates a mental image of the ideal state that the organization wishes to achieve. It is inspirational and aspirational and should challenge employees. If we achieved all strategic goals, what would we look like 10 years from now? A values statement lists the core principles that guide and direct the organization and its culture. In a values - led organization, the values create a moral compass for the organization and its employees. It guides decision - making and establishes a standard against which actions can be assessed. These core values are an internalized framework that is shared and acted on by leadership and guides employees as they make day to day decisions in their work. Collectively, mission, vision and values define what we do, why we do it, and how we work.
We have included updated mission, vision and values on the culture roadmap on the following pages. Additionally, there are five “ goal areas ” that have been identified through the culture survey sent out to employees earlier this summer and through work of the Culture Initiative Team and Senior Leadership Team:
1. employee growth and development, 2. collaboration, 3. customer service, 4. communication, and 5. positive work environment.
The Culture Initiative Team and Senior Leadership have met throughout the year to discuss different areas of concern of Orange County employees. On pages three (3) and four (4) you will see graphics of our organization ’ s Mission, Vision, and Values as well as Culture Roadmap. Please look at these graphics as they are what we as an organization are working toward. As we begin calendar year 2023, implementation teams led by goal co - champions will start working on the issues identified. Goal co - champions will be creating teams that will
help to plan activities, support goal co - champions, and be a point of contact for ad hoc teams. Ad hoc teams, are temporary teams that will execute specific initiatives. The implementation structure shows how issues will be addressed to meet the goals that teams have set.
The four initiatives that will be tackled first include:
1. preparing new employees for success by creating an onboarding program, 2. engaging all staff to create values statements by getting employees to help define the values, 3. improve two (2) way communication by disseminating information in new and different ways, and 4. communicating Orange County ’ s shared mission, vision, and values to all staff and to the community by using our new methods of two - way communication. Groups are tackling these four initiatives first and then will proceed with completing more initiatives within each group of goals. This culture roadmap will guide our work together over the next two years. Below is a visual of the implementation structure. These changes will not happen overnight and will take everyone ’ s help to bring to fruition. If you are a County of Orange employee, please join us in making positive changes within the organization to help make this a great place to work.
If you would like to help any of the five implementation teams above, reach out to Roadmap Coordinator, Michelle Williams, mlwilliams@orangecountyva.gov.
Page 2 | December, 2022
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter