Employee Value Proposition Framework: What Do Employees Get?

Developing an Employee Value Proposition: A Six-Part Framework

1. What do I get? Your EVP is more than transactional

Developing an employee value proposition (EVP) means understanding what makes your organisation attractive as an employer, and finding a distinctive way to communicate it.

But how do you build an EVP that goes beyond a generic list of benefits, values and promises?

I've developed an employee value proposition framework built around six questions. Together, they help you explore what your organisation genuinely offers, what makes it different, and why the right people might choose to work for you.

This is the first of six articles working through those questions. We'll start with the most obvious: What do I get?

How to Build a Distinctive Employee Value Proposition

These six questions are not six EVP pillars. That means I am not suggesting that you should try to build all six areas into your EVP. Trust me, there are a lot of subquestions to answer too, and if we tried to build every one of them in, we wouldn’t get anywhere.

We’d have a huge and unmanageable list, and the only way to make that operationally useful would be to condense it down. That condensing phase is almost certainly going to strip out anything that is interesting or distinctive about you.

As I said in the introductory article: “You cannot afford to remove the main weapon in your EVP armoury: your distinctiveness.”

What I am looking to do here is give you a way to look at each question, and each subquestion, until you find the elements that are genuinely distinctive about you.

That should produce a short(ish) list. Just as importantly, the process should give you enough context about the organisation to start connecting those ideas together.

Many organisations will share some of the same individual themes. Only you connect this particular group of themes in quite this way. That’s how you start to become distinctive, and how you get a foothold in people’s minds as an employer they could choose.

What Do Employees Get from Your EVP?

For some EVPs, this is both the start and the finish.

And classically, the stated employment proposition was curt: “Do this task, for this many hours, in return for this many coins.”

Of course, that exchange still exists. At the point at which you’re marketing an actual, live role, it is very much in play. If the trade-off isn’t right, you’re already fighting a hard battle for the attention of candidates.

But what we’re considering here is something broader. How are you going to give people reasons to consider and commit to you? How do you want to present yourself to them and, over time, shift their perception? How do you make sure that, next time they consider a move, they already have a rich and accurate picture of you that stays front of mind?

That’s a different place from “here’s a role, do you want it or not?” And it gives you a lot more opportunity.

It means you can examine all that you offer in return for someone choosing to give you their labour, time and commitment.

Financial Rewards and Employee Benefits

The obvious place to start is the whole reward and benefits package.

There is a time and a place for talking about this line by line. You should make sure that place exists. At the crunch end of making a decision, that accumulation of individual lines can tip the balance in your favour.

And when you do that, you need to talk in detail. In numbers. Where possible, in numbers that people can understand and compare with other packages.

Take pensions. If you are part of the UK’s Local Government Pension Scheme, simply describing your pension as “excellent” may well be accurate, but it’s a comparative, when you may be able to present a superlative. The scheme works very differently from the defined-contribution pensions many candidates will be used to, and its potential value may be poorly understood.

So explain it. Help people understand what they are getting, rather than relying on them to understand why the words “good pension” should matter to them.

Reject vagueness: What Makes Your Reward Package Distinctive?

“Generous”, “excellent” and “market-leading” are all in the eye of the beholder. Ultimately, you need to be specific and comprehensive.

But while you are developing your EVP, the task is slightly different. It is about going through each line of the package and asking whether any individual item - or combination of items - gives you something that genuinely stands out.

Employee surveys may help, but be careful how you interpret them. Reward can score badly even where there is good evidence that an organisation pays competitively. Pay is personal, comparative and emotional. A poor score tells you something important about perception; it does not automatically tell you that the package itself is poor.

Your Reward team (whether that is a team, a person, part of somebody’s role or even outsourced) may be able to tell you more. What gets taken up? What gets ignored? What generates the most enquiries? What do new starters seem surprised by? What do leavers discover they will miss?

Somewhere in there may be something valuable that you have simply become too used to seeing.

Flexible Working and Work-Life Balance

You will want to talk about flexibility, because candidates and employees want to talk about flexibility.

But flexibility doesn’t have to mean highly hybrid working without fixed hours. For some people, regular, rigid hours at a place that isn’t their home offer the best possible work-life balance. It’s predictable, it’s social, it’s separate. It works for them.

Other employers, and other people, will be looking for a different mix. And in deciding on that mix, your organisation will probably have heard from lots of people with lots of valid reasons for their preferences. Your eventual decision will have been made by balancing those needs and concerns.

That, right there, is a potential part of your EVP.

Not every flexible option is right for every person. But you’ve settled on what is most right for your organisation, and people can accept and support that, or not. You aren’t here to please everyone. You are here to stand out as you.

In fact, there’s a wider point here. Sometimes what people value isn’t flexibility at all. It’s certainty. Knowing when they will work, where they will work and when work will finish can be every bit as valuable as being able to move those things around.

Consider the question: “What does the way work is organised here give people. and who is that valuable to?”

Recognition: What Does Your Organisation Value?

I think recognition belongs under “What do I get?” too. It is part of what comes back to me when I give something of myself to an organisation.

I’m not saying this is always easy to evidence, and I’m certainly not saying this is all about structured recognition schemes and who walked away with Employee of the Month.

But if you do have an Employee of the Month, who wins? The person who closed the most sales, or the person who got the best customer feedback?

Both are valid. Both might make your company more successful and the individual more satisfied. But which one you choose says a lot about your organisation. What you recognise tells people what you really value. And that therefore says quite a lot about whether I want to be part of it. Perhaps even whether I should be part of it.

Recognition starts telling me something about who you are – of which more in Part 4.

Job Security and Long-Term Career Value

I’m putting security in here too.

It isn’t something that often sits on a list of benefits, but it can sit very high in the minds of employees and candidates. If people have a choice about where they work, and how much of themselves they give at work, they are going to make some judgement about the security that an employer offers them.

That, after all, is one of the important differences between employment and a succession of transactions. There is an expectation of some continuity. I need to believe that the bills will get paid this month, and that there is a reasonable prospect they’ll get paid in the months after that.

Currently, almost no job is 100% secure. Everyone is potentially at risk from downsizing, reorganisation, changing technology or changing demand, including people performing some of the most essential roles in society.

So, if we can’t make guarantees, what we can do is think more broadly about the ways in which we create security.

That may not be security in the traditional sense of a job for life, or even a job for the foreseeable future. It might instead be that the experience and learning you get with us creates security, because you become more employable elsewhere.

There are big employers - the Big Four are obvious examples - where spending time there can itself become valuable career currency. People may stay, or they may pass through, but passing through can leave them with experience, contacts, credibility and skills that strengthen whatever they do next.

There’s no reason that principle only applies to huge employers. Perhaps your version of security is: “Time spent here will leave you better equipped for whatever comes next.”

Which leads us nicely into the next question…

What do I get to do and become?

Because the moment we start talking about the experiences, skills and credibility that somebody takes away from working with you, we have moved beyond what they get.

We’re starting to talk about what happens to them because they work here.

And I hope that is another demonstration of the point behind this whole series. Although I’m giving you a list of things to consider, the output shouldn’t be a list.

It should become a narrative that connects those things together and gives people reasons to choose you.

Next time, I’ll look at the work itself, autonomy, achievement, learning and progression — and the question of whether somebody can see themselves becoming more by joining you.

Summary: What Should Your Employee Value Proposition Offer?

The first question in developing an employee value proposition is "What do I get?" And the answer should go well beyond salary.

There are five areas worth investigating:

• Financial rewards and benefits: What do you offer, how does it compare with alternatives, and what might employees particularly value?

• Distinctiveness: Which elements of your reward package, individually or together, are genuinely worth talking about?

• Flexibility and certainty: How does the organisation of work fit different people's needs for freedom, predictability and work-life balance?

• Recognition: What kinds of contribution and achievement does your organisation notice and reward?

• Security: What confidence can people have in their future, whether through continued employment or greater employability?

The aim isn't to include all five in your final EVP. It's to find the things that matter to the people you want to attract and retain, and that you can credibly claim to offer.

A stronger EVP isn't a longer list of benefits. It's a distinctive proposition that helps people understand why they might choose you over another employer.

And, as we'll explore in the next article, what people get is only part of the story.

Meantime, you can read about my services to define EVP here