Did you ever have that teacher? The one who warned you what happens when you “assume”?
By making assumptions, we set ourselves up to fail. When setting out to define your EVP, it is absolutely necessary to check your assumptions at the door and learn to question everything; to do the research from the ground up and to learn to see your company through fresh eyes.
Often, if we have been with a company for a longer period of time, or if we have been part of the departments that talk about what the company values or what values the company provides – like in HR or Marketing – we can have the sense that we already know what the EVP is. There is a huge temptation to believe that we can save time and money by skipping the research and moving straight to rolling out what we think the EVP should be. When you use your best guess as to what your employees’ value – a couple of things can happen:
1. Low Employee Engagement
Your employees will not truly connect with the company, if they don’t agree with the corporate messaging on what they value. At best, employees will not feel the message is aligned with what they are looking for from an employer; at the worst – the message can be perceived as inauthentic or not genuine. Instead of helping to engage your people, it could push them away.
2. Hiring Candidates that don’t fit the culture
If the EVP is not accurate, then your candidate attraction and recruitment process may be screening for the wrong attitudes or values. Increased mismatches between the candidate’s values and the company’s values can result in longer time to productivity for the new hires; reduced motivation from work teams around these wrong-fit candidates, and decreased overall efficiency.
3. Increased Turnover
Lower engagement and new hires that don’t mesh with the culture will inevitably lead to increased turnover. New hire turnover will increase due to poor culture fit; lower engagement will contribute to more tenured employees becoming more active in their own job search.
Research is one of the most important components of employer branding — it is absolutely critical to have your foundation (EVP) reflective of what employees truly value about working at your organization. For that reason, an effort must be made to use multiple methods to engage your current employees in talking about what they really see as unique about your company. Research can be done in a multitude of ways. Use formal and informal methods – from surveys to water-cooler chats; perform stay interviews; involve employees from every nook and cranny of the company in focus groups or questionnaires. The more employees you have involved in the process, the more likely you will have an accurate EVP.
Bring it together to look at it as many different ways as you can, to distill it down to a genuine, compelling EVP. Instead of assuming that you already know what your employees value, take the opportunity to see your company through your employees’ eyes – and maybe you’ll see something new.
