What is an Employee Value Proposition and Why Do you Need One?
Raise your hand if you are struggling to find skilled workers? Yep, everyone! I don’t know of any company that isn’t struggling to find and keep employees – ESA included! There is a real worker shortage across the US, and it is impacting all industries, some worse than others. You have probably heard of “The Great Resignation”, the term that has become so prevalent due to the millions of employees that have left the workforce. Pew Research Center recently published a study that found most workers who quit were reacting to low pay, few advancement opportunities, and a demoralizing sense they weren’t respected in the workplace. Ouch! Is that why there is a shortage? Because employers aren’t providing enough benefits to their current teams? The data speaks for itself, but we also cannot ignore the fact that the US lost a good percentage of its eligible workforce due to Covid stressors, such as many women leaving the workforce to care for children due to school closings, spikes in early retirement, death rates increasing, etc.
So, what can employers do? Many are responding by increasing their wages to be more attractive, but that may be a short-lived solution with some very costly side-effects (hint: crazy inflation!). Enter Employee Value Proposition (EPV) programs. EPV is a part of your employer branding, and a huge way that your company can attract the skills and employees needed and keep them engaged. It is your company’s marketing campaign to prospective talent, and if you actually fulfill your EPV, it’s how you retain those cherished team members in a competitive job market.
Defining your EPV is not the same as restating your company mission statement, or your company’s brand statement (the one you share with your customers). EPVs define the internal relationship between you and your employees. They are promises you make to your potential, and current employees, regarding what working for you will bring them – including pay, benefits, growth opportunities, and culture. Some examples of EPVs include promises to upskill workers to keep up with emerging digital skills, offering pet insurance, flexible schedules, gym memberships, volunteer programs, and financial rewards beyond traditional bonuses pools.
The key to making a great EPV is to work with your current employees on defining it. Don’t try to define it yourself. Instead, you should involve your employees and ask them what provides them value by working for your organization. Then ask them what more your company can do to bring them value and reward. Once you have it defined, use it to hire your next recruit! Ideally, you want to create a short video that includes your employees talking about the EPV and what they get back from working for the company. It doesn’t need to be a high production video, using a tool like TikTok will make it easy to whip up an attractive video. Finally, be sure to include the video in all your job postings so that candidates can see and hear what working for the company will bring them.
I don’t want to skip over a key component of EPVs, and that is career growth. A July 2021 poll conducted by Monster found that:
- 86% of workers feel that their career has stalled during the pandemic.
- 79% feel pressure to push their careers further as the pandemic ends.
- 29% of workers named lack of growth opportunities as their reason for wanting to quit.
- 80% of workers do not think their current employer offers growth opportunities.
- 49% of workers expect their employer to play a part in career development.
These poll results overwhelmingly tell us that if your EPV does not have clearly defined career growth opportunities included, you may as well not even develop one. ESA’s National Training School is here to help build out career pathways for your technical and sales teams. Using our customized training-as- a-service pathways, we have developed multi-level tracks for several companies so that they can establish clear roadmaps that provide skills development along with promotions to their employees. Contact us today to see how we can help you build out your EPV’s growth opportunity component.
(Source 2: https://learnmore.monster.com/job-index-in-the-time-of-coronavirus)
To see more examples of EPVs see: https://builtin.com/employer-branding/employee-value-proposition-examples.
