Building a Strong Employee Value Proposition

The principles of marketing offer useful parallels for enhancing Employee Value Propositions (EVPs). By applying structured planning, strategic analysis, and a commitment to detailed execution—as seen in successful marketing strategies—organizations can significantly improve the value offered to employees. In the spirit of spring cleaning, take a look at your own EVP and consider how they might be optimized to ensure alignment with both organizational goals and employee expectations.

Successful organizations understand that betting on a 'single coin toss' is risky. Instead they display confidence by executing integrated marketing campaigns to achieve their objectives. This makes perfect sense even to an HR guy: after diligently making a decision to go to market with your new product or service, confident that it meets a customer need, you sustain your investment in marketing campaigns long enough to get results.

I'd like to argue for taking a page out of the marketing playbook; that same level of strategic analysis, structured planning, and commitment should be equally applied to developing you Employee Value Proposition (EVP).

An EVP must articulate what an organization embodies as an employer. This includes detailing the "give and get" of the employment deal—matching the value that employees are expected to contribute with the value they receive in return.

What Employees Value:  Employee Value Proposition

To bring it back to what HR can learn from Marketing, I'd like to share the "Value Pyramid" concept that was discussed in an article in HBR by Eric Almquist, the global head of consumer insights for Bain, where he outlines customer values across four categories: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact. The most successful companies build customer loyalty by delivering multiple elements of value across these categories.

Let’s apply similar principles to your EVP. A well-crafted EVP should provide prospective and current employees with value on multiple levels, especially the higher ones. Consider:

• • Variety: is there a collection of professional development opportunities that enable employees to achieve their career potential?
  • Wellness: do you place a value on work-life balance and/or flexibility in the workplace in a way the contributes to employee motivation?
  • Affiliation: is it the mission or mandate of the organization that drives people to want to join and stay? Does company’s reputation for high quality products or services have an impact on employee motivation?
  • Self-transcendence: does the company make a commitment to being socially responsible and offer opportunity for employees to give back to the communities within which the organization is operating?

With a little effort, a variety of factors, unique to your organization and aligned with your strategy, can be identified and quantified as attractive to prospective recruits and existing employees whose loyalty you wish to retain.

Clearly an investment in properly defining your employee value proposition (EVP) is critical to maximizing the ROI on your HR programs for attracting talent and ensuring employee retention. Sometimes those marketing professionals actually seem to know what they’re talking about!

About the Author:

Dean Fulford brings more than 20 years of experience and a deep expertise in leadership development, organizational development and design, project management, process mapping, and best-practice benchmarking activities. With an extensive background in organization development and effectiveness, performance consulting and process improvement, Dean compliments his HR background with strong process management and competency-based project experience.  He is a member of Stratford’s Leadership team, responsible for its Leadership Development practice area. Dean has held HR Executive roles in high technology and financial services firms, responsible for design, implementation, and oversight of organizational development, effectiveness and human resource programs at both the local and global levels.

This blog post was originally published in 2016 and has been updated with new content. .