If you’ve gone to the trouble of really clarifying your vision for your company, you might think it would be easy to get your employees to rally behind it. Most companies don’t have a strong vision driving them, after all. Yours does, concisely explaining the goals you’re all striving towards, and the defining direction you’re headed in.

So why don’t they care? As carefully crafted as the vision is, the employees just aren’t interested. They don’t talk about it, they don’t think about it, and they definitely aren’t being guided by it.

Vision is at the heart of a larger issue: Company culture. Company culture is organic. It’s a living thing, and the product of the personalities who make up the company. And as your company grows, your company culture evolves. Great culture is hard to create, and it’s also easy to screw up. Once you establish it, you will need to go to great lengths to protect it.

That ongoing evolution means that you’ll also need to be constantly adapting and updating your vision. As the leader of your company, it’s your job to set True North for everyone else, and to re-set that direction as needed. But it’s not a one-directional process.

No matter what the vision is, it exists at the heart of a larger, constantly evolving company culture. While you, as the leader, do set the vision, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

When you start building your company and bringing in employees, they become a part of the business in a fundamental way. Their perceptions and interpretations of the vision get put into this organic mix of company culture. Obviously, this will have a real impact on that vision’s execution.

It’s all too easy for it to become a runaway process, and for the culture to grow in directions that you didn’t expect. Most companies will have a mix of different kinds of employees. This means different ages and backgrounds, and it also means different interests, attitudes and skills. Most relevantly for the vision, it also means different philosophies and goals.

Maintaining a clear vision can be a real challenge in companies where you have employees from different generations, for instance. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how a Baby Boomer owner, Gen-X management and a staff of Millennials could bring very different values, perspectives and expectations to their work.

If you have a vision, the only way to get all of your employees on board with it is to include them in the process. This doesn’t mean you let your employees determine or define the vision, but it does mean putting in the effort to involve them in those situations where it makes sense. This can be as simple as telling your employees your vision for the company, and then asking for feedback.

It’s also worth considering it from their perspective. Why, as an employee, should they care about the company vision? It’s easy to understand and care about a long-term vision as an owner or executive, because you’re both the most invested in the outcome and the most likely to reap any benefits.

But for someone whose primary motivation is exchanging their time and skills for a paycheck, what’s the incentive? Why should they care one way or another about something as abstract as a company vision unless it comes with a raise? How will embracing the company’s vision change anything about their lives in a meaningful way?

Rank-and-file employees can absolutely buy into a company vision, but it has to have a tangible meaning for them. By involving these employees in the vision process, you’re giving them a voice in the direction of the company. If you actually listen to and incorporate that feedback, you’ll find that those same employees are generally more willing to embrace the vision they helped to create.

The key to making this work is sincerity. You can’t simply pay lip service to involving your employees in the process, and then dictate a vision to them. They’ll tune you out. At best, they’ll pay that lip service right back to you, saying what you want to hear about the vision when you ask, but paying it no heed otherwise. It’s your vision, after all, not theirs.

When you take their perspectives and ideas into account, the dynamic changes. You’re aligning your interests with theirs. You’re treating them like stakeholders in the success of the company, and giving them a great reason to become engaged with the overall direction. When you’ve got that alignment, everyone has a reason to buy into the vision.