With the rise of social media, brands are made differently now. What happens on the inside of your organisation is now completely transparent. Your brand and your culture are now one and the same. In fact, culture is your brand on the inside, yet most organisations continue to overlook this.
What Your brand and people stand for should be alike
Every new hire has the ability to shape or break your culture. Every employee has the ability to shape or break your brand. Which is why today’s most successful businesses have invested in their brand and their people alike.
For your brand to be successful, it must be embedded into your organisation and delivered upon every single day. Your brand and your people must stand for the same thing, inside your organisation and out. Which is why we love employee value proposition projects, because it helps to strengthen your success, inside your organisation and out.
The best EVP
Your two greatest assets, your brand and your people, should be alike. They should stand for the same thing. And that thing should be your business’ higher purpose. The best employee value proposition (EVP) captures your business’ higher purpose, and helps to attract the best, like-minded talent. It helps you to attract, and keep, the right people with the right values, so you can set out on your course to become even better. An EVP makes you more attractive as an employer. A great EVP should connect, motivate, provide purpose, incite pride and inspire your people to be better than before. By playing to the emotional elements rather than the rational, an EVP helps to attract and recruit the right people for your organisation, more effectively.
aspirational yet realistic
A great EVP captures your higher purpose, and defines what makes your workplace unique. It should be aspirational, because aspiration draws people in. However, it should also be realistic, because we don’t want to promise people the world, and not be able to deliver it.
An EVP isn’t about benefits
The best employee value proposition (EVP) will not compete on employee benefits. Because at the end of the day, they’re not the things that you can truly own or compete upon, as your competitors can offer them as well.
Instead, a great EVP will look deeper into the organisation and its culture, and identify what makes working at your organisation truly unique. Often that comes back to the higher purpose, asking “what are we ultimately trying to achieve?”.
How to create the best EVP
Firstly, it’s important to understand the business setting, the culture and the brand. Ask a series of questions similar to:
- What’s the current situation?
- What are the current people-related issues?
- What people-related aspects are we doing well at?
- What people-related aspects do we want to keep?
- What people-related aspects do we want to change?
- What attracts people to our organisation?
- What makes people leave our organisation?
- What’s the perception of our organisation in the marketplace?
- What can you be the best in the world at from an employer perspective?
- What are you offering that other competitors aren’t?
- What’s unique to your organisation from an employee perspective?
Have you invested in an employee value proposition? It’s worth thinking about….
