Five keys to EVP success

Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is vital for successful talent management and acquisition. In essence, your organization's EVP is everything that makes it an attractive place to work, in which staff feel they receive rewards for doing their best. At the end of the day, it is a business's people that decide its success and a strong and effective EVP is essential if you are going to get the most out of them.

Research from Towers Watson had demonstrated the impact an overarching EVP can have. It found organizations with this are five times more likely to report highly engaged employees and more than twice as likely to financially outperform their peers. The advantages are clear, but how do you go about developing a strong EVP that can deliver these benefits? Firstly, there are five key principles that need to be considered.

What makes you special?

In simple terms, an EVP represents what is special about your organization and what sets it apart from its competitors. So, to develop your EVP you must first think about what it is that separates you from the rest. EVP is affected by everything a business offers its staff from pay through to social activities, and all of these things need to be taken into consideration.

When thinking about this, there are some useful questions that need to be asked. Is the company heavily reliant on salary for attracting staff and keeping them happy, and does more attention need to be paid to other attraction and retention motivators? Do you keep the promises made when new candidates join the company and are the organization's brand and values effectively communicated to staff new and old? Being able to answer these questions will help to determine what is special about your organization and set you on the way to developing a strong EVP.

Know your workforce

It is impossible to develop a strong and effective EVP without a detailed knowledge of who your workforce is. The modern workplace is a more diverse place than ever before and currently contains four generations - Seniors, Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennials. People are working for longer and this means demographic diversity will only increase in the coming years.

The way people work is becoming more varied too. Nine-to-five, job-for-life employees are slowly but surely being phased out to be replaced by workers who value mobility and flexibility. The growth of the contingent workforce is a prime example of this. A good EVP takes this diversity into account and is designed to appeal to each member of the workforce as much as possible. Indeed, organizations with a larger number of contingent workers can benefit from the establishment of a specialist contingent workforce value proposition.

Attract involvement

An EVP is supposed to be all encompassing and take into consideration everything your organization has to offer. For this to be achieved it needs to feature the involvement of all members of the businesses from top to bottom. Securing the support of the c-suite is particularly important, as this group naturally has a huge bearing on an organization's values and how it gets things done. After all, how can an EVP represent a company if it hasn't received the input of the people who make its decisions at the highest level?

Spread the word

EVP and employer brand are two distinct entities and should not be seen as interchangeable. However, they do go hand-in-hand when it comes to marketing your organization and ensuring it is attractive to both existing and potential employees. EVP is essentially the foundation on which a brand is built, allowing the message to be spread about your organization and why it represents a good place to work. In the current business environment of skills shortages and a lack of quality talent in key areas, having an attractive brand that can spread the word about your EVP is invaluable.

An ongoing process

The final key to developing a strong EVP is to remember that this is not something that can simply be thought about once and then left to its own devices. As your organization grows and evolves, so too must your EVP if it is to remain relevant to the people who will ultimately decide the business's success. Regular monitoring, be it through employee satisfaction surveys and analysis of staff productivity, will help to achieve this.