Laura Hoppa – Principal Performance Consultant It’s easy to get tangled up and turned around when applying the buzzwords of the talent industry.
Ever wonder if an employer brand should be based on an employee value proposition (EVP), or the other way around…or if they could actually be the same thing? Or find yourself asking, “What’s the difference between our culture and our employee experience?” Maybe your employee engagement survey leaves you questioning whether engagement is a means or an end?
The truth is that these related concepts get easily mixed, mingled, and intertwined—and every organization seems to talk about or approach them just a bit differently.
The sooner you clarify your organization’s point of view on these terms and align your team, the faster you can start transforming your workforce. Read on to understand five concepts to help your people become your loyal fanbase.
Let’s start with the big why: To be our best as a company, we want to fill our rosters with highly talented people and then maximize their performance. Employee engagement has shown itself to be a leading indicator of high performance. That’s because engaged employees lean in. They bring greater personal effort and strive for more alignment to company strategy. They’re happier in their roles and more fulfilled by their work. Engaged employees receive great value from their employment relationship, so they work at the relationship too. In this way, engagement is an upward spiral that continually builds on itself.
Employee engagement isn’t an action as much as it’s a state of being—it’s the feeling that drives an employee’s relationship with their organization. We measure engagement by tracking things like enthusiasm, loyalty, admiration, trust, and promotion. It’s also smart to track the activities that are demonstrated to lead to engagement—like rating their workload; forming friendships; connecting to the company purpose; knowing that leaders care about their well-being; experiencing inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; managing work-life harmony; and feeling appreciation.
Employer brand is the assessment of how an organization stands up within the context of the employment relationship. Prospective employees want to know if the organization succeeds at engaging employees; if it offers them value; and whether it’s a great place to work.
Sound familiar? Consumer brand is the assessment of how a company stands up within the context of customer relationships. That’s no coincidence. Wise companies realize their employees are, essentially, a customer base. The value exchange is different than traditional customers—but they are “buying” nonetheless, because engaged employees pay dividends in performance. The goal is to win their time, talent, and energy every day. If they’re receiving the “membership benefits” they envisioned when they signed on, they will happily spend those resources with you. This is how you fan the flames of engagement. Beyond compensation, employees are looking for feelings of accomplishment, growth, pride, gratitude, and appreciation.
Your employer brand is based on how much value you deliver within the (usually unspoken) terms of this relationship. It’s the summation of the way you are perceived as an employer, or in other words, the reputation your company has garnered for impacting the lives of those in their workforce. Most importantly, it’s defined not by how YOU describe the organization, but by how the world actually sees it. Essentially, the employer brand is something you influence, but you don’t control. There’s no magic wand to make the public think of you in a particular way. There’s only the hard work of managing the reality of who the organization is as an employer, and making sure the world sees it, so your brand can follow.
That means examining how you’re currently winning today, and how you might be falling short, so that you can address it. But…winning or falling short compared to what? To measure success, you need a clearly articulated company vision of what great looks like as an employer. Great companies need an employee value proposition.
Your employee value proposition, or EVP, describes the unique employer you are meant to be—the ideal you’re striving for. It should include an honest description of employment at your company today as well as aspirations for tomorrow. It should highlight the distinct ways people benefit because of employment with you. And it should be unapologetic about what you’re seeking from them.
Authenticity is key as you develop, or reinvent, your EVP. Like any relationship, if employment is going to work, it must be built on honesty, trust, and mutual respect. Don’t be shy about your “price of membership”: the hard work that’s needed, the challenges ahead. You may have high expectations, but if they are necessary and fair—to the right person, they are part of the appeal.
Drafting an EVP is about explicitly stating what is usually unspoken between an employer and employee; it shines a light on each party’s aspirations for a win-win agreement. Don’t mistake it as transactional. Great EVPs work because they are highly relational. Your EVP should be a never-ending relationship alignment tool. It’s not just for recruiting—it’s for continual, organizational fine-tuning. It helps you ask, “Are we living up to our vision as an employer? Are our employees receiving all the benefits we hoped they would? Are they rising to the challenges of employment with us, and are we seeing their highest performance? Are we all in this together? Are we delivering value?”
As you put words to your realities and aspirations, don’t be surprised if it suddenly seems that you’ve opened a door you can’t close. Being authentic and explicit means examining the dark corners and finding opportunities where employee value can be enhanced. There’s nothing quite like opening the curtains and letting the sun in, to make a person want to clean up a bit—or even fully renovate!
This isn’t a simple, easy task. However, focusing on offering employees more value is the most effective approach you can take to increase your company’s desirability as a place to work —thereby elevating the talent, loyalty, and productivity of your workforce.
Let’s talk about what it means to authentically increase your employee value proposition. Some might go straight to the idea of culture change. After all, a company’s culture is the employees’ communal calibration to how things get done, comfortably, within an organization. It’s essentially the organization’s collective definition of “what’s normal around here.” Improving these norms where needed is indeed a great way to positively impact employee value.
However, culture is a nebulous entity that’s tough to grasp and famously difficult to change. It’s a web of written and unwritten rules, forged through social influence and discovered through behavioral cues. These unspoken guidelines aren’t always perceived at a conscious level, nor are the subtle social pressures that keep them in place. That makes it nearly impossible to impact culture by going at it directly.
Instead, true culture transformation relies on shifts happening at a more concrete level. When you change the tangible aspects of your employees’ realities, the culture will also change in relation. Be intentional about designing concrete experiences that strategically shift your culture in the precise ways you desire. That will bring you to the work of understanding and addressing employee experience.
Employee experience is what happens to employees, every day, because of employment at your company. It’s the collection of all their day-to-day interactions with each other, their leaders, and anything they see as coming from “the organization”. This includes everything from technology platforms, processes, physical work environment—not to mention the operational structures and systems at the very core of your operations. All of these factors shape their thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Employee experience is big—essentially, it’s everything. Although, some aspects of it are more critical than others. Often called the “moments that matter” in an employee’s journey, these moments are the pivotal points for engagement and performance. When a company can identify these specific make-or-break times, and then show up well, it really counts.
THIS is the place to dig in, to make your biggest impact. Leaders have a great deal of control in these moments that matter. This is where you can make tangible, intentional decisions that will be seen and felt by employees. These actions can be thought out in advance and based on facts and data offered by employees themselves. They can be carefully designed to positively and meaningfully impact culture, employee engagement, employee performance, organizational performance, employee value proposition, and employer brand—all in one meaningful moment.
Ready to make an impact that sets you up to attract and retain the best talent, winning the talent wars so that your company can be its best? Your devoted, productive talent awaits!
If you’d like to assess any of these areas in your organization, map a vision for your future state, or simply chat about what’s working and what’s not, we’d love to connect. For more from Laura on this topic, check out this article: