I reject complexity in Employer Value Proposition
Introduction to a series on developing your EVP to produce a simple a proposition, without missing anything crucial
Why do I reject complexity in Employer Value Proposition?
If the proposition is complex, the audience won’t get it. If the evidence and framework behind the proposition are complex, your stakeholders won’t understand it. If the tools for, and expressions of, the proposition are complex, they won’t get used.
Simple is good because simple is memorable, understandable, usable, repeatable. Feelable.
That said, I think it is possible to be too simple in your approach to defining your proposition. And if you are, I think you introduce two risks.
Risk 1: Limiting Your Options
The first is that you’re only selecting from a limited number of potential pieces for your EVP. That means there are only so many ways to connect those pieces together, or to tell your story. And that means your story is likely to sound like other people’s, maybe most other people’s. Remembering, of course, that AI is already sitting there just waiting to synthesise your story down to something samey.
You cannot afford to remove the main weapon in your EVP armoury: your distinctiveness. There’s a reason I always talk about distinctiveness first. If you’re not distinctive, you’re nothing. All the other effort may be wasted.
It’s true that many employers do similar things, with similar people, for similar customers, in similar places, while offering similar rewards for doing similar tasks. It’s got to be hard to make that sound different, right?
At the same time, I think Widgetco knows it is inherently different from GizmoInc. What it might struggle to do is express that difference, probably because it is thinking in the narrow terms I’ve just listed. The fewer pieces you allow yourself to work with, the fewer opportunities you have to uncover something genuinely distinctive.
Risk 2: Underselling Your Effect
The second risk is that you’re under-selling the reach of the EVP, and therefore its potential.
If you:
· talk solely in terms of “the deal” – you get this in return for your labour, or
· describe EVP as simply the expression of the employee experience, or
· explain EVPO ass anything else that is by itself relatively small and easy to explain or quantify
then you make the EVP itself easy, small and therefore less important.
Unless EVP is already in someone’s bones, you’re not going to convince anyone that you need time, money or resource to do something useful with this.
And by useful, I mean persuading the people who determine whether your organisation succeeds or fails to come here, stay here and excel here.
Those are the terms we should be thinking in. And if we want to achieve that, we should accept that getting to a simple statement shouldn’t necessarily be easy, because that statement is going to have to work hard.
Start Broad
So, when you start to define your EVP, I think you need to go as broad as you can. You need to be prepared to get complex, to be really granular, to get among the weeds. To dump all the possible pieces on the floor and sort them out one by one.
Because then we’re not just looking for the best case we can make for ourselves. We’re also understanding some of the associations, blind spots and prejudices people bring to our organisation. We’re building a much better picture of the compromises in play: what people are prepared to accept in order to get the things that really matter to them.
That isn’t simple. That’s complex. And complex is, of course, daunting.
So, we need to give ourselves a route map if we’re going to work our way through it. This series is intended to provide one.
Six Questions You Need to Answer
Over the next six articles — seven including this introduction — I’m going to work through the six questions I think your EVP needs to answer:
What do I get?
What do I get to do and become?
Who will I do it with?
What kind of organisation am I joining?
What are we trying to achieve?
What does being part of this organisation say about me?
Why these six?
For one thing, they ladder up into a clear story by themselves. By asking the questions in this order, we’re already starting to develop our narrative. That should make the eventual act of condensing everything into a simple idea much easier.
For another, they are, natch, research based. They stretch all the way back to one of the earliest pieces of research I did as a consultant, developing a framework that explains the factors behind why people choose to join and stay with employers.
That work covered academic research, professional bodies, consultancies, the major engagement survey providers, and influential voices and experts. I’ve kept it under review ever since. There have been some tweaks along the way, but it has proved robust and served me well.
I hope now it can help you as you start to define or refine your EVP.
Complexity + Agility
Before I finish this introduction, though, I want to say one thing about speed and agility. I’m asking you to undertake something rigorous and, to use my own word against me, complex.
Rigorous and complex in employer branding have sometimes become synonyms for slow and expensive. I reject that too.
By following the path I’m going to describe, I think you can build rigour in without making the process any slower or more expensive than it needs to be. There will be an emphasis throughout on using what already exists, what has already been agreed, and what you can already prove.
That requires less permission, and therefore less compromise. And compromise is what so often slows EVPs down and shackles them. It is also one of the things that stops them being distinctive.
Throughout the series, I’ll keep bringing my direct experience of doing this to bear, so that you can see where to start, what to look for, what to reuse and how to keep momentum.
Next Time…
We’ll begin with what sounds like the simplest question of the six: What do I get?
Pay, benefits, flexibility, security, recognition. The obvious building blocks of an employment proposition.
Obvious, perhaps. Simple? Not quite.
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