One thing that the pandemic caused was employees to rethink the world of work and their expectations and relationship with work.
The current labour market in the UK remains tight and there are extremely high levels of unfilled vacancies. The chart below from the ONS shows how vacancies have risen since 2005, to September 2023 (the numbers are cut off on the chart – shoddy work ONS!)
The combination of a shift in employees expectations and a massive rise in vacanies, with not enough candidates to fill them shines a bright light on the importance of EVP.
So lets start by looking at what EVP really is, because it isn’t just about salary and financial reward. Although in all honesty with the impact of rising interest rates hitting mortgages, the increase in rents and food and utilities continuing to rise, if you aren’t paying competitively, you are on the back foot before we start.
Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the value you offer potential new employees in return for working for your organisation. Without question, salary and financial reward is a large part of this, but when recruiting in a competitive world, the best employers look at innovative ways to increase their EVP. In other words, they look creatively at how they can stand out above their competitors to attract the best talent in a small pool.
So what things do you need to consider?
- Employer branding
- Salary & compensation
- Management & leadership
- Benefits
- Well being & work-life balance
- Growth & development
- Diversity & Inclusion
Employer branding, at the top of the list is often forgotten about, but is a powerful attraction tool. It is essentially how you market your company to potential employee’s. It is important to communicate your organisation’s mission, vision and values. Explain what it is like to work with you and describe the culture and employee experience. Many organisations use their websites to showcase this, using video’s of employees, so that potential employees can hear it straight from the horses mouth!
An important part of creating or improving your EVP is finding out what your employees and therefore your target market of employees actually value. There is no point implementing a whole suite of benefits if they are not going to be taken up. There are many great companies now offering great cost saving benefits on top of the other standard benefits you can implement, often quite reasonably.
Find out through talking to your team or set up focus groups or surveys to establish their wants and needs. What are their pain points? Find out what your companies USP (unique selling points) are. What makes your company a great place to work? If it isn’t a great place to work, you have some work to do to get it there!!
Another key point to remember is that employees more often than not resign due to bad managers not bad companies, so if your managers are not effective, investing in their development is a crucial first step and something Surge Ahead can help with. Poor managers can have a massive impact on the profitability of the business as not only do they effect employee morale, motivation and productivity levels, but also retention and potential damage to reputation on employee review sites like Indeed and Glassdoor.
The CIPD noted in the labour market outlook report for Spring 2023 that in order to address the hard-to fill (read impossible to fill!) vacancies issue, half of employers responded by up skilling staff and half responded by rising wages. Up skilling staff and investing in growth and development would always be something I would recommend as an L&D professional. Surely investing in the development of your people , giving you a pipeline of strength to plan the succesion of your business is a no brainer, talent shortage or not?
In conclusion, once you have developed your EVP, you need to ensure you have communuicated it in the right way, to both employees and potential candidates. You can do this through your company website, careers page, social media and job adverts. By creating a strong EVP and communicating it effectively, you stand the best chance of finding and retaining the top talent you need to succeed, whilst winning the war on talent.
