Organisations must walk the walk when it comes to EVP

Talking the talk and walking the walk are very different, and this holds when it comes to EVP. Businesses need to show that they care by actively pushing for improvement.

EVP or employee value proposition, according to Hays, can be defined as something that seeks to identify and communicate benefits: “Covering both tangible and intangible factors, from your company values and culture to rewards and opportunities, it introduces the unique benefits and experience an employee receives in exchange for their skills and experience.”

HR Leader recently spoke to Logicalis Australia’s head of employee experience, Scott Brown, about what EVP entails throughout contemporary organisations, and how they can improve their EVP to best ensure positive employee experiences and business outcomes.

Brown spoke to the changes that have happened with EVP over time, and how organisations should view the scope of it compared to previously held notions of primarily extrinsic benefits being the crux of EVP.

“It's the lived experience that you have when you work somewhere [It’s no longer about] do you have a nice office and do you have a coffee machine? All these sorts of things now seem outdated.”

“Where EVP now sits is around, do you have a very clear understanding of the things that you value as an organisation? Are you very clear on what your purpose is?”

The changing dynamic was something that Brown thoroughly explained. With new initiatives surrounding subjects like inclusion, diversity, and sustainability, organisations have to adapt and commit to inserting these into their everyday workplace routines.

“If you tell people that you are flexible and you care about inclusion, that has to be reflected in the experience of people's day. You have to back it up with systems, processes, policies, benefits, and probably most importantly, behaviours from everyone, but particularly your leaders,” said Brown.

Extrinsic benefits have been the status quo for EVP since its inception. Whether it’s company cars, coffee machines, pay rises, or other benefits, organisations often become too fixated on these items and ignore the intrinsic values that employees are yearning for.

“The evolution for us is really to move from the extrinsic things like, do you pay well? And do you have a nice office? Do you have car leasing? Instead, we want to move to something that's more purpose-driven.”

“[For example], we work in an industry that got an absolute hammering during the recent allocation of the gender pay data. We need to make sure that we're not just saying, ‘We're a diverse place to work,’ because, in the engineering world, four out of five graduates are still male. For us to articulate that we're an inclusive organisation, we need to make sure we have inclusive practices and that our leaders know how to be inclusive and provide psychological safety,” said Brown.

Moving on from the traditional extrinsic mindset when it comes to EVP is vital for businesses. It means they can ensure that their employees are enjoying their time in the workplace and that the company values are consistent with their everyday experience.

Companies must adhere to their values in reality, and everyday situations, or else employees will begin to be suspicious of a number of things and could class them as fraudulent, in terms of the workplace culture that they aim to set.

“Everyone's sick of talking about COVID-19, but the thing that's changed is that people don't care about car leasing, offices, and coffee machines. They care about, am I working with someone who has the same values and care factors that I do? And if they don't, then it's probably not the place I want to work,” concluded Brown.