Employee Value Proposition: strategic advantages from offering a valuable professional proposal to the employees.
What is Employee Value Proposition?
The HR focus on the person inevitably leads companies to think in terms of Employee Value Proposition: let's deepen together the meaning of this concept and what impact it has on the business
In the era of Employer Branding, we often hear about EVP: Employee Value Proposition, or Employer Value Proposition, if we prefer focusing on the business side. Do we really know what it is? We can define the Employee Value Proposition as the perception that employees have of their work experience based on the corporate culture, the professional offer that the company gives to its workers, as a whole. The external perception of the organization also contributes to composing the real value proposition of the company, the one that candidates make on the basis of the Corporate Image.
In fact, we can imagine the Employer Value Proposition as the compensatory proposal, made up of economic offers, services and benefits, but also of values, principles and initiatives that the company offers to the employee in exchange for the skills and competences that the worker brings to the organization. It is a set of tangible and intangible factors that the company puts in place to meet the needs and expectations of its employees: these factors together combine to form the employees’ idea of the value of their workplace.
The building of this concept has to be aligned with communication and marketing: without a coherent strategy that fully transmits the value of the professional proposal and its uniqueness, even the best intentions from the company can be unattractive in the eyes of candidates and employees, failing to meet HR brand and Employer Brand Proposition objectives.
How to build up a winning Employee Value Proposition?
The professional environment is a constantly moving, fluid and dynamic reality, in which it is unthinkable to pay a bonus to employees in an aseptic and flat way and automatically expect back their loyalty and satisfaction: people look for attractive and stimulating professional proposals, in which dreaming of being able to put one's skills to good use by feeling involved in a larger project, of which salary or economic rewards are only a part.
The LinkedIn 2022 Global Talent Trends Report highlights that the main value proposition for employees is offering a good work-life balance (63% of respondents), followed by excellent payout and benefits (60%) and from corporate culture (40%) – [Data sample: survey of 20,000 users].
It is very important that leadership and HR, within a broader Employer Branding strategy, in order to have an Employee Value Proposition that is unique and differentiated from the competition, consider listening to their employees as a first step: understanding what are their expectations, their needs, their professional dissatisfactions is crucial to be able to formulate an authentic and effective proposal, which fills the organization's weaknesses and meets people's wishes as much as possible.
In fact, the Employee Value Proposition exists when there is a structured business in an organization: what companies need is an effective strategy that makes their proposal interesting and consistent with the principles of leadership and results objectives.
After identifying the areas where to act, it is necessary to match with the company's objectives and the possibilities for action in the field of compensation & benefit, flexible work organization, career opportunities, welfare and wellbeing, corporate culture, Corporate Social Responsibility. These are the main intervention themes that combine together to build the best possible Employee Value Proposition.
Flexibility is a relatively new factor but has become of primary importance in recent months: the aforementioned Linkedin 2022 Global Talent Report highlights that flexibility is an essential value proposition for companies. From 2019 to 2021 there is an 83% increase in the number of job offers that mention flexibility as one of their main features: this is an extremely important issue, especially for the Millennial and GenZ generations.
What returns on business from a successful Employee Value Proposition?
A good Employee Value Proposition generates several advantages for the most innovative companies: first of all, the retention of their best talents, with a reduction in turnover linked to professional dissatisfaction.
In the same way, a successful Employer Value Proposition, inserted in a valid Employer Branding strategy, has the function of attracting the best candidates, those with profiles more easily in line with company values, facilitating the recruiting process.
The impact generated by the Employer Value Proposition is therefore also reflected on costs, allowing savings on recruiting costs: moreover, more engaged employees with a higher level of engagement are more productive and will guarantee better performance.
The communication is not less important: an effective Employee Value Proposition allows to differentiate the brand from the competition, allowing better positioning on the market with the effect of facilitating the meeting between supply and demand in the talent market.
