Employer branding, EVPs and the power of employee engagement

This week we speak to Sarah Coates, our Brand and Marketing Strategist, who explains why businesses must consider their employer brand when working on their overall brand strategy, and how keeping her client experience has helped in the move to agency life.

What are you most excited to be working on right now?

Right now, it’s got to be employer branding and EVPs (Employee Value Propositions). We’ve just delivered one for a client and the whole process was so rewarding. Getting under the skin of their recruitment and retention challenges, their culture, and how we can best articulate their employer brand was a real privilege. We spent time with their HR, marketing and senior team to gain a 360-degree understanding of the views of their employees, leadership team and market to identify common themes and universal truths to unlock a compelling EVP.  

My passion has always been people, psychology and marketing, so employer branding and EVPs are the perfect blend of these areas. Being happy at work is, after all, 50% of life’s puzzle so helping companies fulfil that is very important to me, and making sure each side wins is the ultimate goal.  

For those who haven’t yet come across employer branding and EVPs (we’ve written a bit more about EVPs here), they are the cornerstone of a company's relationship with its current and future talent audience. An employer brand is a company’s reputation, an outside perspective on a company’s values, work environment and experience. An EVP communicates the promise a business makes to its employees and the commitment they make in return. It should communicate to current and future employees the values, culture and genuine employee experience of the company so they can self-select and join a company where they can thrive and achieve their potential. 

It should be a give-and-take between the employer and the employee.  

Your customer value proposition and your employee value proposition are two sides of the same coin. After all, the power of your brand is in the hands of your people, and it takes very little for this to be undermined so aligning the two is critical.   

Why the hype?

The reason why it’s so exciting right now is that it’s rapidly gaining credibility in organisations, as a key tool in attracting, engaging and retaining top talent, and it impacts profitability. A survey from the British Chambers of Commerce (August 2023) supports this view, with 79% of businesses surveyed facing recruitment difficulties. So many businesses we speak to echo these challenges.  

Research has shown that companies with highly engaged workforces are 21% more profitable and 17% more productive than those with disengaged staff [Gallup, 2023]. With more businesses facing these issues, coupled with a strong business case for building engaged workforces, companies are waking up to the need to take ownership of their employer brand to stand out.  

At Mobas, we’ve developed an employer branding strategy framework, including EVPs, and are delivering more and more of these. Often the need is identified as part of our research and insight phase, where we uncover evidence that supports the need for an employer brand strategy but increasingly we are being approached to work on employer branding strategies and EVPs as a stand-alone project which is exciting.  

What difference can an employer branding strategy and EVP make to a business?

You could have the most amazing brand and strategy, but if you don’t have the right kind of people inside your business who are engaged and are delivering on your brand promise, your company won’t delight and connect with their client base. If your team isn’t excited by your brand, why should your customers be?  

Your company and culture isn’t right for everyone and you can’t be all things to all people so developing an employer brand and EVP brings clarity in explaining who you are and who you’re not! This makes sure that you attract and retain the right people who will deliver and perform, helping you to drive business growth.  

Employer branding used to be the job of HR departments, but the C-suite is now getting involved, and both HR and marketing teams are working together to craft well-thought-through strategies. Companies can’t control what people say about them, but they can certainly do their best to put a strategy in place to cultivate a positive reputation that people are excited by. It’s a massive risk to not do anything at all, which so many companies are doing.  

Companies need to think about the entire employee lifecycle from recruitment through to people exiting the business and the alumni experience. Word-of-mouth marketing, as we know, is incredibly powerful so companies should leverage this and think about all aspects of the employee journey. 

What is your background?

Over the past 20+ years, I’ve worked client-side in several senior positions at Cambridge University Press, healthy dog food Woof&Brew and Haworth office furniture, and was Head of Marketing at MAP Patient Access, leading the marketing team. Mobas is my first agency role and I love the variety of the work, but I still wear my client hat daily and know what it’s like to be in the client’s shoes.  

As an in-house marketer, especially those working in an SME, you can be pulled into so many areas that aren’t related to your core role, and marketing is often undervalued as a strategic lever for business growth. A large part of the role is educating key stakeholders as to the value of marketing and the other challenge, of course, is that everyone has opinions about marketing with many thinking you should be on every channel! I empathise with our clients and never want to lose that! 

What is the one thing that you’d like people reading this to take away?

Whatever the size of your business, or stage of your journey, please do think about all aspects of branding rather than just what your customer sees. Brands live across so many levels, and in our increasingly transparent world your employer brand will impact your customer brand and vice versa.

I would love to chat to anyone about their employer branding strategies so either connect with me on LinkedIn here or drop me an email at say.hello@mobas.com with the subject line Employer branding and we can set something up.