As a founder who promotes remote working, how do you communicate the value you place on your employees?
An employee value proposition (EVP) is your opportunity to clearly lay out what you offer your remote working staff- pay and benefits, career development, family-friendly working and more. A clear and concise EVP is key to your branding strategy and lets your existing staff and potential employees know what you offer and the value you place on them.
Here at NoHQ, we want to help you find and retain the best people for your organisation so we’ve put together this guide to putting together the best EVP to achieve that goal.
Why do you need an employee value proposition?
The Importance of a Great EVP
Attracting Top Talent
Remote and hybrid working has given employees more choices, making them more discerning when job hunting and recruitment marketing has changed accordingly.
Business 2 Community now defines recruitment marketing as the “awareness”, “consideration” and “interest” journey that a prospective employee passes through before entering the actual recruitment pipeline of application, selection and hire.
An attractive EVP raises your organisation’s awareness in the market, improves your chances of being considered by job seekers and increases their interest in you as their future employer.
This is particularly true of the estimated 60% of candidates described as passive job hunters by LinkedIn. Passive job hunters aren’t looking but are receptive to what your company offers and can become active by looking at your job board if they like the sound of you.
Reduce employee turnover
According to the Global Talent Monitor from research leaders, Gartner, the top 5 job attributes that influence employer selection are compensation (47.1%), work/life balance (41%), stability (34%), location (33%) and respect (32.6%).
Staff retention is essential to the growth of your company and using your EVP as a blueprint for staff welfare has cost-benefits that go beyond just recruitment. According to Gartner, “your organization can reduce the compensation premium by 50% and reach 50% deeper into the labor market when candidates view an EVP as attractive,”.
Help Your Business Grow Further
A strong EVP will help differentiate you from the competition but beware of anything that sounds too gimmicky. Allowing your employees to bring their dog to work plays well to a good work/life balance while trampolines in the break room… not so much.
Your EVP is all about building and retaining a strong workforce that can run your organisation. Keeping your staff for longer builds strong institutional knowledge, making handovers (when they do happen) easier and transitions of staff much smoother. A dedicated and talented workforce is a boost to your business and delivers shareholder value. An EVP acts as your guide to keeping them.
How to Build a Strong Employee Value Proposition
Step 1. Assess what you currently offer
If you don’t yet have an EVP, work out what would be on it if you did. List everything you currently offer from salaries to benefits, both core and fringe.
Go through the list and check off each item against where it would sit in a structured EVP. Your checklist should include:
- Salaries
- Time off
- Health insurance
- Career development & growth
- Work/life balance
- Mentoring & knowledge sharing
- Travel opportunities
- Wellbeing
- Feedback processes
- Onboarding processes
- Investing in people
Once you have your starting point you can see where your policy is weak or has actual gaps that you need to fill.
Step 2: Ask your Employees
The people who know your company culture best are your existing employees. This is a great opportunity to review what they think works, what doesn’t and what’s missing.
Use your exit surveys to glean information about why good staff left and consider bringing in outside survey consultants to design impartial questionnaires for existing staff.
Step 3: Identify Future Hiring Needs
Recent events have taught us that nothing is certain and any industry can change overnight so forecasting your future hiring needs can be difficult.
Look at where you want your company to be in 5 years and which departments will need to expand or contract to achieve that growth. What will your R&D need to look like and how will new products change your manufacturing sales and delivery processes? What will be the profiles of the ideal candidates to fill those roles?
Outside consultants can give you an impartial view and consider using scenario planning experts to help you see new and competitive ways forward as the world and your industry change.
Step 4: Draft your EVP
The goal of your EVP is to match up what your future employees want and what your organisation can offer them. You now have the barebones based on your review, research, surveys etc and it’s time to get them in order.
Your goal is a unique, distinctive and compelling offer that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Remember that you can’t please all the people all the time so look at what your limitations are and what you can and can’t include. Make sure you’ve included everything you can deliver and most of what employees are looking for but be realistic and don’t over-promise.
Step 5: Finalise and evaluate your EVP
Once you have drafted your EVP, take a step back and look at it. How can you make it stand out?
If your aim is to catch the attention of passive job hunters it needs to be attention-grabbing with visuals that convey its message. Make sure that images are relevant and of your actual staff and premises - stock images will always look like you're hiding something.
Use quotes from staff and graphics to convey and support the messages in your text. Take a look at what other companies in your sector are doing and then look outside your industry for new ideas and ways to get your message across.
Step 6: Promote your EVP through the right channels
How you deploy your EVP will dictate how valuable the exercise has been.
Internally you can use it in staff newsletters and leadership updates, in email footers and anywhere else that helps ingrain it as a key part of your corporate culture.
Externally it can become a key part of your HR landing page, make a splash in your social media and be a new tool for your marketing department to deploy across your industry and beyond.
Conclusion
As the name says, an EVP is about values. It’s where you demonstrate your organisation’s values and the value you place on your employees.
The right EVP, correctly marketed, will position your company to attract and retain the staff you need to grow into the organisation you envisaged when you first sat down and laid out your dream on a napkin.
NoHQ is an educational platform for remote companies. Think of it as a wiki of tools for remote work and an ever-evolving resource that helps companies enable and inspire their remote workforce.
Get in touch with us to talk about building an EVP to attract and retain the remote employees you need to grow your organisation.
