Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#64 The process behind creating and embedding an EVP

• Mel Loy • Season 1 • Episode 64

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Welcome back to another episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast. This week, we dive into part two of the EVP-explained series where we explain all things EVP, why it matters and how it matters to a comms pro.

For this episode, we've uncovered the process behind creating your EVP, step by step, alongside how you can embed it. We then give you the nitty-gritty details behind how you can gain traction internally, build excitement around your EVP and also make sure that the EVP aligns with the culture of your business.

So, why wait? Jump into this week's episode with us now!


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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, friend, and welcome to a new week and a new episode. And as always, it is an absolute pleasure to have your ears listening in for another week. Before we get into today's episode, a reminder that this is part two of our chat about employee value propositions or EVPs. And so if you haven't listened to last week's episode yet, hit pause now, go back and find episode 63 and give that a whirl first. And if you've already listened to that episode, then welcome to part two. So last week we got into the nitty gritty of what an EVP is, why it's important, and the key elements we should include. A quick refresher, because it has been seven days. The five elements of an EVP that I shared last week were, number one, career progression and development opportunities. Things like having challenging work, but also having very clear career paths available, no matter what role you are in. The second piece was values and purpose alignment. So a strong why and behaviors that people can connect to reward and recognition was the third piece. And that's about, yes, remuneration and bonus structures, but more importantly, that those are fair and equitable as well as systems that reward great work and values in action. The fourth piece was positive culture. So that includes those first three elements, but ultimately a great culture is underpinned by trust and building that requires leadership, communication, a sense of autonomy, and a shared sense of purpose. And the fifth piece was humanity, which is all about recognising employees as human beings, not robots. They have unique needs, aspirations, and they have challenges we need to work around. Now, as I said last week, all these five elements are important because they're what makes up an EVP that not only attracts, but retains great talent. And that means more people are engaged, which means better performance, better sales. There's less cost to the business in terms of knowledge loss and recruitment costs and so on. In some companies, they think offering perks like a discounted gym membership or a big bonus is enough and that that can make up for failings in other areas. But that's just putting lipstick on a pig- shiny things that just aren't meaningful. So that's why those five elements are important. And now you know about them. How do you actually create an EVP and then communicate and embed it? That's what we're going to tackle today. So settle in and let's get going. I'm going to talk you through six steps of creating, communicating and embedding your EVP. So step one is about setting goals. Where do you want to be? Specifically, what do you want to be known as, as an employer? This is all about your reputation. What do you want people to say about what it's like to work for your business? You should also think about this in the context of your organisation's strategies and goals. So what does the EVP need to do to help achieve those strategic goals? Also, this reputation you want to build needs to be underpinned by your organisation's brand and vice versa. Right? So your EVP needs to support the brand as well. And this is where you'll need to reference those five key elements we worked through in the last episode, because it is time to get specific. It is not enough to just say, we want to be known as an employer of choice. What does that actually feel like and look like in reality? Who are you an employer choice for in that utopia in terms of the work, the type of work that people get to do? What does that look like? their career opportunities, how you want people to treat each other and all those things. And then you want to get even more specific about what that looks like for your particular organisation. You don't want an EVP that is so vague that it could apply to any company or any industry. Then it's just largely meaningless. It's just word salad. You need it to really speak to what you do for people and why you do it for them. And I will share some examples later in the episode from some other companies. It can be helpful here also to think about maybe a core set of principles that you will apply to your EVP. So for example, everything we do will be focused on the employee experience, or we will always seek employee insights. We want people to feel at home. So what are some of the core principles that you may want to apply? And they may align with your organisational values as well. If you have that set of guiding principles, it can help with the decision making around what you do and what you don't do and what that reputation is that you want to build. So that's step one, get clear on the goal of your EVP, specifically the reputation you want as an employer. Okay, step two, now you know where you want to be, Where are you now? And how will you validate your thinking about what's important to people? So step two is all about doing an audit and doing your research. So go back to those elements of the EVP and look at the current state in your business. What initiatives or policies, whatever, have you got in place now? And how would you rate how you're achieving against each of those EVP elements? And are they still relevant to the workforce you have today and the one you want in the future? So that's really important as well. Things that were important to people five years ago are probably not as important now. And if you look to the future state of your business, what does that look like in terms of the type of people you want in your business? Now then it's about the research. So this is like voice of the customer stuff, but it's internal. So you need to have these insights and data to be able to back up your thinking and make sure you're creating something that people actually want, not something you think they want. So a survey is a good start here, but I would definitely recommend some focus groups of different cohorts, both past and present employees, so that you make sure you're getting some really... genuine, authentic responses; and in that, because you want genuine and authentic, I would suggest bringing somebody in who's external to do this step because a third party who has this mandate of being neutral can give people a sense of trust and that encourages them to open up, whereas they may not open up to people within the business. They may not feel like they can be very honest about their experience. Now, once you've done your research, then you need to do the gap analysis. So what did your research find out about the current state versus where you want to be or where you think you need to be? So look at those points of similarity and the points of difference to help you narrow down where the gaps are and what you might need to do differently in your new EVP. So let's go to step three, and this is all about segmenting your audience and mapping out your EVP. So While the EVP generally is something that will be quite consistent across all your work, the way you position it and the different offers will depend on who you're talking to. So at a broad level, this is usually three audience segments. You've got your current employees, potential employees, and the third segment that I call interested observers. So These could be people like your board, investors, other players in the sector, even the media. You may also want to include your employee alumni, because if they're still talking great things about you, that is super helpful for your organisation. And there's always the chance that you can lure great talent back. But let's look at two of those main segments in more detail. So current and potential employees. Again, it is time to get granular. So for your current employees, let's segment them down even further. So for example, you might have different cohorts like leaders, senior executives, team members. Maybe you have people in different countries. Maybe you have people who are office based, others who are on the road or based in a store, for example, and career path progression will look quite different for somebody who's working in front of a house. That's the front of house role, like a shop or a restaurant versus the person who works in finance at head office, just as an example. So that's one way to segment, it is by role. And similarly, when you start to segment potential employees, think about the different roles you want to recruit for, now and in the future, the types of skills and talent that you will need, but more importantly, the type of human you want working in your organisation. So, again, how do you make your EVP relevant to those different cohorts or different segments of potential employees? What I would suggest doing is creating a bit of a matrix where you have the different elements of your EVP along one side and the different cohorts or audience segments down the other side, and then map out what those different EVP elements look like for each audience - that helps you just get those thoughts out in a really logical way. I would also highly, highly, (and you should do this) recommend you look at the EVP from the perspective of the entire employee life cycle. So what I mean by that is from the very first moment where they even consider working for your organisation, Through the interview process on boarding, when they're with you, the off boarding, so when they leave the organisation and when they become alumni, what does the EVP look like for every one of those touch points along their experience? And this is where you will have to work with other stakeholders in the business to determine what that EVP is going to look like and feel like more broadly and for each audience segment along each step of the journey. So it can be helpful to set up a bit of a working group here that has representatives from different parts of your business. So you know that the voices of different employees are heard and included in your EVP. Now, a top tip here, having involvement from all parts of your organisation also fosters this sense of ownership over the EVP by those who are involved. So that can help you with your communication and change effort later, because people feel like they've been heard, that their voices are reflected, and that they've had a part in developing this EVP. Now, quick note. You need to make sure that whatever you're putting together is both aspirational and achievable. There should be some stretch goals in there that make your organisation focus on the work, but at the same time, don't promise the trip to Disneyland if you can only afford the local water park. So that's step three, segmenting your audience, mapping your EVP. Step four. Well, this is now the time that we start to put things together and test and learn. So you've got this draft EVP mapped out. You've got to test and learn. It's just a draft at this stage. So before you go crazy communicating about it, you need to make sure it's going to work and it's going to resonate with your audiences. This is where you'd go out to a diverse group of people from your audience segments and introduce the draft to them. And this could be in a written format, a loom video, a webinar. Whatever you need to reach the people you need to reach, give them time to process the draft and then ask questions. That's really important. Now, what are the questions you're going to ask? There's plenty, but for example, here's just a few off the top of my head. What was the first thing that stood out to you with this draft and why did it stand out? What do you think works well? What do you think needs improvement? Does this EVP inspire you to work here or continue to work here? Why or why not? How do you think this will apply to your role or your team? So note that those are all open ended questions. They're ones that start with why or how. So they encourage you to get good results, not just yes or no answers. And again, this could be done via a survey, but I would still do some focus groups to really tease out the why behind some of these responses. And then once you've got the feedback, of course, it's then time to update the EVP draft and share it back with your internal stakeholders. going through those usual review and approval processes. Now, you know where you want to be, what you want people to feel about your organisation, and what all the elements of your EVP will look like for different audience segments along the employee lifecycle. It's time to wrap it all up nicely in a bow. So we're at step five, which is developing the narrative. So the first step to developing your narrative is bringing all those key elements together and developing a statement that talks about the type of employer you are and how you serve the people who make your business run every day. So again, talks about the type of employer you are and how you serve your people. It's a statement that spells out what people can expect when they work for your business in terms of how they'll be treated and what's on offer. It is short and it needs to be clear, compelling language because you want people to grasp it quickly. So this isn't where you talk in detail, not yet. about the specifics for different roles. This is where you talk to the overarching intent of your EVP or the, what I call the essence of it. So I'll share a few examples as promised. This one is from a company called And Pizza which is a pizza chain, fast food chain in the USA, and this is their EVP statement. A strict no ceiling policy means there is no limit to how high you can go. We don't see And Pizza as a job, but as a career. And we don't see a person as a mechanised robot with a set of limitations, destined to fill a certain role. We see you as you, an individual. Who you are now, and who you want to be. So start your journey today, and see just how far you can go. So it's really unique. It's unique to their company. It's concise. It talks about having a career path, which probably needs to be prioritised in a fast food industry where you can imagine you'd have a lot of people, young people coming in at the ground level serving pizza, not realizsing there are actually growth opportunities for them throughout the business. So this can really help with retention. If that's something that you're focused on. I really liked also how they talked about we don't see a mechanised robot, you know. So they are using this language that really, uh, engages people and helps you, uh, use your imagination a bit and really resonates with you. Uh, here's a couple of others to get those creative juices flowing. This is from Yelp, you know, the, the online company where you can leave reviews. We believe in giving our employees the tools and resources to keep them healthy, wealthy, and wise. Whether it's a gym subsidy, unlimited snacks, or healthcare benefits, we believe happy employees are successful employees. This one's from Canva. Sometimes the chance comes up to be a part of something really special. Canva is making design amazingly simple for everyone and the potential is limitless. We're empowering people to design anything and publish anywhere. So the difference between those two, the Yelp one is very much about the perks, the benefits, you know, that's what they're focusing on very much around, you know, keeping people happy, you know, doing things that, uh, um, Keep them happy and all those sorts of things. Yes, it's quite in a way It's a little bit more transactional, but they're clear on that The Canva one is very much aligned to the why and the, the values of the company So that's clearly what they're pitching on so you can see how they're quite different So you get the gist the key elements of your EVP narrative are

number one:

What's the overall approach to how you treat people at your business, i. e. what's the heart of the experience? And number two is what can people expect from working for your business? So those are just the short EVP statements; But you should also develop a tagline that can be used across a range of materials like your recruitment ads, intranet, website, etc The tagline is just a few words that sums up that EVP essence that I was talking about So for example, uh, Merck, which is this multinational pharmaceutical company, their EVP tagline is invest, impact, inspire. Now they say that is all about encouraging a continuous cycle of invention, making an impact and using that to inspire internally and externally. So three words using, you know, riffing off alliteration, which helps with, uh, memorability as well, invest, impact, inspire, you know, really sums up the essence of what they're about as an employer. Nike, uh, unsurprisingly they use win as a team. So that of course is a homage to their market being sports and exercise. And it's backed up with a whole lot of perks. Starbucks uses empowered to live life well, uh, on their jobs website, Netflix mentions that their core philosophy is people over process. So again, really simply sums up what they're about and uses that alliteration to help, uh, make this a memorable piece. Last example, HubSpot. They use your work. Sorry, your best work starts here. So on their website, they go into detail about what that means in practice. Things like they offer sabbatical leave, fully remote work, unlimited holidays, et cetera. So for them, it's all about promoting a balance between work and home life to bring out the best in people. And they also have a document on there that's called the HubSpot culture code. And that's absolutely worth a look. So you get the idea. Start with a longer statement and then whittle that down to a few words that capture the essence of your EVP to use as a tagline across all of your comms. The great thing about taglines is they're short and simple, which means they can be memorable if they're unique enough. So again, think about how you can make yours stand out from the rest of your industry or your competitors. Okay, so it's one thing to have all the words and pretty pictures, but it's another to actually put this into practice. So step six is about launching and embedding your EVP. So let's start with internally launching your EVP. You want your people to be able to talk about the EVP to other people. So launching it is about making it easy for people to remember and align their own values to, and themselves too. I would suggest that instead of all of the launch coming from the CEO, you ask some of the people involved in developing the EVP to share their experience in the process and what they think of the end product. Those stories will be so much more powerful and memorable because they're coming from peers. And that helps create that sense of ownership that we talked about, but also social proof, which is so powerful when you're trying to sell in an idea. On that, though, launching an EVP needs to be genuine and authentic, not just about the fluff. So try to avoid those gimmicky things like a stress ball on every desk, whatever. Think about what would genuinely bring the EVP to life for people. And, you know, maybe it's an animation that talks about what people can expect along their entire employee journey. Maybe it's handwritten notes from leaders to their teams. You know, just think about what you could do. That's genuine, helpful, and informative that speaks to your people. And the last thing you want when launching is for people to think, what a waste of time and money. I'm sure we've all been there. You know, you, you get these gimmicky packs put on your desk or what, you know, go to a town hall or whatever. And you just think, what a waste of my time and what a waste of money. Go back to those three comms objectives that we apply to everything. What do you want people to know? Feel and do as a result of your EVP launch communications. From there, from a comms perspective, at least it's about looking at opportunities to weave in the messaging, wherever it makes sense. So around performance reviews, for example, or CEO town halls, employee recognition events. It's on your website, on your intranet, job ads, et cetera. The key is make it visible. It's also about gathering stories of the EVP in action and the positive outcomes it has and sharing those far and wide. It's one thing to talk about the perks. It's another to demonstrate the impact of your EVP on individuals. It's a powerful way to show why people should work for you and it is excellent social proof. Now, of course. All of this hinges on the organisation actually delivering on its EVP. We can't talk about things that aren't real. So that's the big caveat here. Okay. It is time for your episode recap. So if you want the short snappy reminder of what we've covered today, here it is. At the top of the episode, I mentioned that this is part two in a series of EVP related episodes. Last week, we spoke about the five elements that make up an EVP, and this week was about then developing and embedding your EVP. Step one was know your goals. Where do you want to be with your EVP? What's the reputation you want as an employer? How is this underpinned by your brand? And how does it help the company achieve its strategic goals? Step two, do an audit. So do your research, find out where you are now versus where you want to be in terms of your reputation as an employer and what you offer. Speak to past and present employees and find out what's really important to them and what they think about your business as a place to work. And again, it can be helpful to get a third party in to do this so that people feel safe to be honest in their responses. Now, step three is where we take our goals and our research and we segment our audience and map out what the EVP will look and feel like for different people, but also different points of the employee journey. Step four, test and learn, draft up the EVP and test it with people from different segments to find out if it resonates, what you need to change or consider, what works well. Step five, communicate. So draft your EVP narrative and tagline. And remember, it needs to be something that is short and concise, but still memorable because it's unique. And step six, embed. Launch your EVP in a meaningful way. No fluff. Then we've the messaging and proof points into everything you do. Okay, so that's our episode for today. Thank you so much for tuning in once again. We've got some really exciting episodes coming up with some really interesting guests, which I will be bringing out in the next few weeks, which I'm excited to share with you. But in the meantime, if you've got some examples of great EVPs that you've seen or ones that aren't so great, I'd love for you to share them with me because it's always great learning for me as well as everybody else. Don't forget you can sign up to my fortnightly mailing list. It is non spammy. The link is in the show notes and every fortnight I will send out a email with the top research or resources that I find from around the web, learning opportunities and learning stuff that you can get from me for free. Also we've got some great training coming up as well. I have a webinar on the 1st of May, which is all about strategic storytelling. It's a one hour webinar. I'm going to share a formula that really works for strategic stories. And, uh, Change. com's bootcamp is coming up later in May as well, so check out all the links for those. In the meantime, keep doing amazing things, and bye for now.