Head of Brand Strategy and Insight, Katie Vickery, explains what an EVP is and why everyone’s talking about it.
During a meeting at the end of last year, we were discussing what the key trends for 2022 would be and the idea of Employee Value Propositions (EVP) being a key focus was raised by a few. They weren’t wrong.
Almost every client I speak to wants our help in defining their own unique EVP. This is mainly because recruitment is such a huge challenge in the current market. With a recession around the corner and with so few people looking for work, it’s becoming increasingly hard to attract talent and those who are in the market to move jobs seem to be able to demand high salaries – simple supply and demand.
An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is a business’ offer to employees and why they should believe in the business, stay with us and join. Namely, it should answer the following:
- Why do I work here?
- Why do I stay?
- What’s in it for me?
- What’s expected of me?
- Why should I care?
You may or may not be familiar with the story of when President John F Kennedy visited NASA for the first time in 1962. During his tour, he came across a janitor who was carrying a broom down a hallway. The President asked him what his job was at NASA, to which the janitor replied “I’m helping to put a man on the moon”. This is such a wonderful example of when someone – anyone – in an organisation understands that their role has an impact on everyone else in the organisation, and that they’re part of a bigger picture and wider vision that that organisation is striving towards. It’s this that we’re trying to articulate when we define an EVP for a client.
It’s crucial to develop an EVP that resonates with the whole team, which is why it’s so important that this comes from within the business. When developing an EVP, the process should involve people from across the business to avoid taking a top-down approach and resulting in an EVP which lacks authenticity. The EVP also needs to resonate with new and current employees, and so developing this also means understanding where the business is going and what makes it unique.
The EVP needs to be:
- Credible – employees should believe and trust that the organisation can live up to it
- Relevant – it needs to resonate with your organisation and market
- Unique – it shouldn’t be generic, but should be specific to your organisation
- Sustainable – it needs to be for the long term
Our Mobas approach doesn’t just take into account the aspects that are owned by HR – the benefits package, the ping pong table, the beers on a Friday – but it also builds in the market drivers, the essence of the brand, as well as the employee and employer needs both for now, and for the future. All of this is brought together into the unique value promise that is made between employer and employee: the EVP.
