Why investing in your Employee Value Proposition leads to the ultimate ROI for your business

With so many businesses competing to find, attract and nurture the best talent, employers are under pressure to find innovative ways to build a compelling Employee Value Proposition. It may seem like an impossible or expensive problem to solve, but investing in the right pieces of your EVP puzzle could be the key to your company’s long-term success.

What is an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and why does it matter?

Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is essentially what makes your organisation stand out above your competitors. If a strong candidate was offered a job at two organisations, including yours, what would compel them to choose your offer over the other one? Is it their link to your purpose, mission and values, and how that shines in your company culture? Is it the way you recognise and reward achievers and provide opportunities for employees to grow and progress in their careers? Perhaps it’s the compensation package or creative benefits you offer to your people. The likelihood is, it’s a combination of all these things.

Put simply, your Employee Value Proposition is made up of all the things that make your business unique.

Because each person will value different things during their employee lifecycle, strengthening multiple elements of your EVP is important to attracting and retaining engaged and productive employees. This includes:

1. Your employer brand – the reputation you have as an employer, which attracts a specific type of employee to apply and accept for a job at your company
2. The employee experience – the interactions employees have from the moment they accept a job offer, through induction and to their day-to-day job, including how they communicate and work with their leaders and team members, to the software and tools they use and their physical environment.

How does strengthening your EVP improve business performance?

Have the right talent doing the right thing, in less time

Socialcast reports that 69% of employees say they would work harder if their efforts were better appreciated. Recognition, which is free, reflects and embeds your company culture and shines a spotlight on the most impactful individuals and teams, while making really clear to new starters what great looks like in your business.

This speeds up the on-boarding and training process, equips people to understand what’s expected of them faster, and gets people delivering their most effective work and feeling great about their contribution.

Investing in your EVP through strategic reward and recognition in this way is an untapped productivity and efficiency hack.

Ideally, your organisation rewards and recognises employees based on your company values, and those delivering on your mission. This allows you to continually communicate and reinforce your company’s purpose and mission, and means employees know what they’re working towards and how to get there. A recent study showed that more than 90% of HR professionals agree that having an effective reward and recognition program has a positive effect on retention, while nearly the same amount agree that recognition drives business results.

A great example of an organisation that understands this well is Peoplecare, a not-for-profit healthcare provider from the NSW south coast. Speaking to a group of HR professionals, Head of People, Culture and Capability, Maree Morgan-Monk said providing opportunities to support, recognise and develop employees is key to its success both as an employer and a health provider.

Maree’s team developed Peoplecare’s reward and recognition program “VIP” to reinforce the company values, known as “True Loves,” and to increase awareness of what employees were achieving across the business. After launching the program, engagement scores increased, and for two years running, Peoplecare has been on AON’s Best Employer list and has successfully continued to attract talent in a regional area with a limited talent pool.

Using the right tools strengthens your EVP

One often overlooked part of the employee experience is the tools that your people use to get their work done.

Equipping employees with the right information from the day they sign a contract to their last day in your business affects their efficiency, engagement and ultimately effectiveness at their job.

When employees waste time looking for information that they need to get their job done, it has an impact on your bottom line. On the other hand, having centralised and user-friendly employee communications tools makes employees better connected and decreases the time it takes to respond to internal and customer queries. This affects productivity, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, your business results.

A study by Watson Wyatt showed that companies with highly effective employee communications outperform companies with less effective communications — they produced 20% less turnover, 47% higher shareholder returns and experienced a 29.5% increase in market value.

Cover-More Group, a leading travel insurance and assistance provider, has hundreds of employees providing support to clients, often in times of crisis or emotional distress. Having the right information available at their fingertips is crucial to their customer service delivery, so the team implemented a unified communications, recognition and benefits hub called “Altitude”.

The platform provides employees news and information in a timely manner, allowing employees who usually spend working hours on phones the opportunity to read and digest important information at a time and place that best suits them. The people team can also segment messages so the relevant information appears on the Altitude homepage when employees first log in.

Because the company information is housed where employees access recognition and benefits, there’s a clear “what’s in it for me” that keeps their people logging back into the site – whether they’ve logged in to recognise their peers with an eCard or read one they’ve received, or access discounts from hundreds of retailers while they’re doing their shopping or planning a holiday. Altitude provides a simple, mobile-accessible one-stop-shop for everything they need to know about Cover-More as an employer.

A strong employer brand makes a tangible impact

Having a strong employer brand means your reputation as a great place to work precedes you. Consider what a strong Glassdoor rating can do to shorten your recruitment time. Better yet, when engaged employees speak positively about your organisation as a place to work, whether it’s at a family BBQ or while out with friends, you’re reinforcing your standing as an employer of choice. It’s likely strong candidates will come to you, rather than you having to spend time and money looking for them.

Great employers also know that their impact reaches far beyond their employees.

They know that solid reputation as a great place to work isn’t built on pool tables or free beer. Sure, those things are nice, but they don’t hold up if people are not fairly compensated or struggle to work under poor leadership or a toxic workplace culture. Great employers know how to make a positive impact in the lives of their people through meaningful work, opportunities for relationship and development, and meaningful, holistic employee benefits that support employees’ financial, mental and physical wellbeing both inside and outside work.

Healius has 12,000 employees nationally, including people working in remote locations and in various roles – from collectors, doctors, and nurses to imaging specialists and people working in offices. It has been on a journey to refine its benefits strategy with the aim of providing something good for its people, and launched an online benefits program that gives employees everyday, on-the-go access to discounts at hundreds of different retailers.

Joel Rethore, Group Head of Rewards, Performance & People Analytics, said, “We’re giving them something tangible and real that fits nicely into our larger suite of benefits, which tells a story about who we are as an employer, and how we care for our people and touch people. We use these to connect with their hearts, and not just their brain.”

For Healius employees the value of the investment is clear – within a year of launching many have already saved hundreds, if not thousands of dollars simply by virtue of working for the company, which strengthens loyalty and improves perception of the company as a whole.

These are just a few examples of organisations who stand out because they have proactively invested in their Employee Value Proposition and are experiencing the return of that investment through an engaged, informed and loyal workforce. The strong candidates that you’re trying to attract, are likely to choose the company they know invests in creating an engaging work environment and a positive employee experience is an obvious one.

So if you’re keen to win the talent war and attract, retain and engage the people who’ll help your business grow, the question remains: are you willing to invest what it takes to stand out?