Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#63 What is an EVP and why is it important?

• Mel Loy • Season 1 • Episode 63

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On today's episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we cross the bridge from comms land into HR land a little to unpack the infamous Employee Value Proposition, or EVP, as it's more commonly known. 

Why, you ask? Well, from an internal comms perspective, particularly, and even a recruitment comms perspective, we need to make sure that the business' EVP is woven into everything we do. More often than likely, your EVP will be run in tandem with HR and the Comms teams as both are just as important in communicating and aligning the strategy, vision and everything in between. 

In fact, you'll sometimes find that the internal comms folks end up being responsible for the development of the EVP, so it also pays to know what one is, what should be in it and what that means for our communication practices. 

Now, don't fret - this is a big topic, we know, so this will only be the first of two episodes. So this week we'll delve into the key elements of a great employee value proposition, and then next week we'll get into the process of actually developing your EVP, communicating it and embedding it. So make sure you tune in for part two. 

Otherwise, let's get amongst it!


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Mel:

Hi, and welcome to Less Chatter, More Matter, a podcast about all things communication without the waffle. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and in this show, I will give you short, punchy, practical communication tips and insights. You can start using in your communication practices right away. I'm a former corporate communication executive who happily took a redundancy, started my own business and never looked back. These days I use my 20 plus years of experience to help guide organisations of all shapes and sizes in how to communicate more effectively. I'm wife to Michael, cat mum to Cookie, aunty to 12 nieces and nephews, a yoga teacher, and a group fitness fanatic. I promise these episodes will always be short, sharp, and helpful, so let's get amongst it. Hi everyone. And welcome to another episode of the podcast. Thank you for tuning in for another week, or if it's your first time here, a big hello to you too. I know how busy everyone's lives are, so I truly appreciate you taking the time to tune in. And I have so much gratitude for those of you who have gone that extra mile to spend just a few seconds more rating and reviewing the show. Reaching out with feedback or ideas, or even just sharing the show with your friends. You are amazing. On today's episode, we're going to cross the bridge from comms land into HR land a little, and unpack the employee value proposition, or EVP, as it's more commonly known. And the reason is that from an internal comms perspective, particularly, and even a recruitment comms perspective, we need to make sure that your EVP is woven into everything we do. Oftentimes, you'll also find that the internal comms folks end up being responsible for the development of the EVP, so it also pays to know what one is. what should be in it and what that means for our communication practices. This will be the first of two episodes. So this week we'll delve into the key elements of a great employee value proposition. And then next week we'll get into the process of actually developing your EVP, communicating it and embedding it. So make sure you tune in for part two. So the reason I think EVP is so relevant right now is twofold. Number one, we are coming up to the end of the financial year, and it will be around this time that organisations are starting to budget for the year ahead. And having clarity on the work required is key. To uplift your EVP will help with your budget. Number two, I've seen some terrible examples of EVPs of late, very transactional where it's all about what the employee has to give in order for the organisation to give them something back, or they are just so vague that the EVP could belong to any other business in any other industry. It's basically meaningless. We have to get our EVP right for a few reasons. Number one, it helps you attract great talent, especially if you are communicating it consistently externally. And if your own employees value it so much, they're advocating for you too. And number two, it helps you retain great talent. And that means Lower turnover, lower cost of the organisation, less loss of organisational knowledge when people leave, better morale, et cetera, et cetera. And we know from research all over the world that a great experience for employees has so many benefits. In fact, research from Gartner found that organisations who deliver on their EVP improve loyalty and commitment by 30 percent and decrease turnover, get this, by 69%. We live in a world where people just have to go online and do a quick search to find out what employees past or present really think about your organisation, your leadership, and what it's like to work in your business. And if those comments are universally terrible, good luck getting a competitive edge by attracting talent and good luck keeping talent for that matter. So it pays to have an EVP that's more than just words. But it's backed up by consistent action. And we do that through communication and leadership. Now let's start though, with one fundamental golden rule of EVPs. And that is, it's not all about remuneration, casual dress days, discounted movie vouchers, and fruit boxes. Those things are nice. But by themselves, they don't create an experience that makes people want to work for your business. Look, you might get the world's most luxurious fruit box delivered every week, but so what if your culture sucks? If you're not recognised for great work or poor behavior isn't held accountable. If you're not given opportunities to learn and grow, I don't care how expensive that pineapple is. People won't stay for it. In fact, research shows us that the key to employee engagement and motivation isn't about money and gifts at all. Dan Pink has a great book. I highly recommend it. It's called Drive, and he shares three elements that motivate and engage employees, they are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the idea of freedom within a framework. It's the opposite of micromanagement. It's where you're given some guidelines to work within, but how you work and the solutions you come up with are largely up to you. And that's super empowering. Mastery means you have the opportunity to grow your skills and your knowledge and really hone your craft, whatever that means. You're not expected to stay in your box or your lane for the entire time you work for that company. You are actively supported to grow. And purpose means you have a strong sense of why there's a bigger picture that inspires you to do what you do every day. So considering those three elements and the fact that pizza parties don't count as part of your EVP. Then what does? I'm going to share five of the key elements with you, but keep in mind that not all of them will be equally weighted necessarily. So number one is career progression. So, as I said earlier, mastery is one of the key drivers of employee morale and motivation. And what that means is when you're considering your EVP overall, what does career progression look like at your organisation? Now, this means, for example, that team members are able to engage in really interesting and challenging work. They're not just coming in every day, going through the motions, doing the same thing and then going home. The work itself needs to be interesting and stimulating, which means it needs to change or build regularly. Otherwise people get bored and have no sense of growth, which leads to poor performance. This category also includes having those opportunities to engage in different roles or responsibilities, even if it's just to act in a different role for a couple of weeks while people on leave have a sabbatical while you get experience. Experience elsewhere, or maybe you have a very formal documented growth plan. The short of it is your organisation needs to have an open minded attitude to people changing roles within the organisation. And yes, that can be a bit of a nightmare when you have to backfill people and people get poached by the teams, et cetera, but that's just logistics. The benefit is you retain people for longer and those people have talent and organisational knowledge. The other piece is, of course, learning and development opportunities. So this is usually a mix of on the job as well as formal training. Some of it's paid or subsidised, or some of it's supported by, for example, allowing people to take leave for study, for example. It can be simple things like encouraging team members to listen to a podcast... this one, or read particular articles or books, share what they've learned with others. I know people who have been at the same company for 20 plus years, but in that time, they've had this opportunity to work in multiple different roles and in different parts of the business. And that's what's kept them there, that opportunity to grow and learn and the organisation benefits, because these people have really deep organisational knowledge and relationships, and you cannot buy that in. Okay. The second piece of the EVP pie is values and purpose. So this is a big one because at the heart of every single one of us is a set of values. And if our values don't align with our employer's values, Houston, we have a problem. So for example, some of your values may be around protecting the environment. And if that's the case, you'd be looking for a business that has a track record of environmental responsibility, and they talk about it. And you probably wouldn't apply to a business like a mining company or a gas company, for example. But corporate values on a website are one thing - actually living them every day is quite another. And so much of what is put out there is just lip service or so vague. It could apply to any business. For example, my, one of my bug bears is integrity as a company value, because I would have thought integrity would just be a baseline expectation. So your values should really underpin your organisation's brand. And in next week's episode, I'll chat more about how you can communicate your organisation's values in a really authentic way. But in short, your EVP must include a clear articulation of what your values are and how they're embedded in behaviors. The other big piece to the pie in this category is a clear purpose. This is the why behind your company's existence, and the reason people want to work for your business. Without a sense of purpose, we're all just going through the motions, which is so disengaging and so boring. We don't exist just for the sake of existence. We exist to move things forward, whether that's big things or small things. And like values, articulating your purpose and what it means for different roles and responsibilities is more than just lip service. It has to be backed up by action. The final element in this particular category is impact. So this is where your people have the opportunity to make a difference. And whether that's in the community, with each other, with customers, so forth, whatever that looks like. Often this shows up as workplace giving programs, for example, or ESG initiatives that your company commits to. And when people feel that they make a difference, that gives them a sense of pride in their work and in their company. And that makes them great advocates... for you. Okay. The third piece to the puzzle is reward and recognition. Now, there's no doubt that remuneration does matter, but as I said earlier, it may not matter as much as you think. It absolutely has to be competitive though. But more importantly, fair and equitable. We've just seen in Australia that organisations now need to publish their gender pay gaps for the first time. Now, if you're a woman sitting in one of those organisations that has a big gender pay gap, I bet that feels pretty rotten. So having fair, equitable pay policies in place is really important. People may move if they get offered a more at another company. But they will definitely move if they find out there's huge disparities between what their peers are being paid and themselves. So fairness is key in this category. The other part of this category is reward and recognition. So this can be things like bonuses and promotions, for example, or annual pay rises, but it can also be simple things like an employee recognition program with genuine awards that really amplify people's great work, their alignment to the purpose or alignment to values, for example. Remember, it's not always the money or the recognition itself. That's the driver or the issue. Rather, it's the disparity in how it's handed out, that is the issue. So awards and recognition programs also need to be fair. A quick side note. Up until my last corporate job, before I started my business, I had never worked anywhere with an annual bonus scheme and particularly in nonprofits. Like I was stoked if I got a gift card. So I never expected bonuses and certainly didn't rely on them when I did work in a place that had them. And when I moved to that business where annual bonuses were a thing, they were calculated on performance reviews. And honestly, I just saw some really gross behaviors, like people bitching and moaning about getting a few thousand dollars less than the year before, which quite honestly, considering their bonuses, was still a huge lump of money, which would have been so helpful to so many people. Or as team leaders, we actually had to come together and work out who would get what, because there was only so much money to go around and we could only award the top rank to two people. So in essence, the performance review process became largely meaningless anyway, because it didn't matter what you rated people. You had to just decide on two anyway. The point is if you're going to have a bonus scheme, just make sure you think about how you talk about it and how you create a culture where it's not an expectation because otherwise people work for money, not for purpose. Okay. The fourth of the five pieces we're going to talk about today is the Big one, culture. So often when you see poor reviews of a workplace on places like Seek or Glass door, people complain about a toxic culture or shit culture. What do they actually mean by that? Culture is built on purpose and values and recognition, all those things we've just talked about, but it also reflects in elements like leadership, communication, accountability, and autonomy, a large part of culture. I wager. centers on this sense of trust. Leaders trust their people to do the right thing. And people trust their leaders to do the right thing by them. When you have a culture of trust, great things happen because nobody wants to let anyone else down. And when we have trust, we enable other things like flexible working arrangements, working from home, accountability, when values are not being adhered to the autonomy to take on some work and try and come up with the ideas and solutions yourself. Great communication is also key to great culture. And in previous episodes, you would have heard me talk about the three T's. They're the three communication principles I apply to change in crisis comms, but pretty much are relevant to all comms. And they are timely, transparent and thoughtful. And if you get those three right, then you could help build a culture of trust in your organisation. But culture can also mean other things like a sense of community, fun, learning, supportive, high performance, a place where people are encouraged to share feedback, and so on. There's plenty of different ways to define a culture, but we'll leave that for another episode. Okay, the final of the five elements we're going to talk about today is what I call humanity. This is a core part of the EVP that recognises that people are humans, not robots. We can't just. Come to work and flick a switch and everything that goes on in our lives suddenly doesn't matter anymore. Or we can just walk in and suppress parts of who we are. A great EVP reflects the human element of workplaces. So what does that look like in practice? Well, firstly, there's policies and procedures that set standards around things like diversity and inclusion and accessibility. It's using those as a framework to help create psychologically safe environments so people can do their best work. It's also where employee well being is prioritised above profit. So this could be things like having mental health days or mental health first aid workers on staff, flexible and hybrid working arrangements, uh, having safe and clean working environments. The basics and so on. It could be having mechanisms to approach leaders about challenges. You're having fear of without the fear of reprisal and so on. But I think above all, the humanity part of an EVP shows up in how people treat each other and the expectations around that you are expected to treat each other with respect and emotional intelligence. So it doesn't matter what role you're in, what your responsibilities are. We recognise each other as fellow humans who all have our own stuff going on. Okay. That was a lot. Let's do a quick recap. So today's episode, as I said, was the first of two on the topic of developing, communicating, and embedding an employee value proposition. And this episode in particular covered. What what should be in an EVP and why you should have one firstly, having a great embedded EVP helps with both attraction and retention of talent. That means great engagement, but also a better business performance, overall. I then shared five broad elements that should be reflected in your organisation's

EVP and they are:

number one, career progression, and that includes things like interesting and challenging work, the opportunity to grow and learning and development opportunities, whether that's formal or informal. The second piece is values and purpose. So this is where we speak to hearts and minds. We have a clear why behind your company's existence and a set of values that align with your people and to which people are actually held accountable. Values and purpose also includes impact. So giving people the opportunity to contribute to the future of their community, for example, the third piece is reward and recognition. So this does include remuneration schemes and bonuses, but remember, it's more important about. Then being fair and equitable, not just competitive. It's also about recognizing great work and recognizing people's alignment to values and purpose. The fourth piece of the pie is culture. So this is what it feels like to work at your organisation. And that's made up of many of the elements we've just mentioned, but it's also about leadership, communication, autonomy, and ultimately building a really deep sense of trust. And the final piece is humanity. Recognising that your people are people, not robots, and they've got stuff going on. And this is where those respectful interactions, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and so much more come into play. Okay. So that was part one. We've laid out what should be in your EVP, because there's a good chance that you, dear listener, will be involved with an EVP at some point. And whether that's as the person who experiences it, or someone who contributes to it, or someone who has to communicate about it. So next week we'll drill down into how we actually communicate and embed an EVP and the process for getting there. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or examples of what a great EVP looks like, something you've come across, you've seen, you've experienced yourself, please share it with me. I would love to hear your thoughts and stories and see some really cool examples. Now, speaking of hearing your thoughts, Once again, I'd be most grateful if you'd put your reviewer hat on and take a few minutes to rate and review the show. Every piece of feedback makes a big difference. And don't forget every fortnight I send out a brief update with the latest news from the world of comms, great resources from around the world, and some of my own free learning. So if you're not on the mailing list yet, use the link in the show notes to get on it. I promise it's always valuable and never spamming until next week. Keep doing amazing things. And bye for now.