The Employee Value Proposition: Definition, Key Elements and Examples
What is an EVP? A definition
An Employee Value Proposition is the promise you make as an employer to your employees in return for their commitment. This promise entails the sum of all the benefits and rewards employees receive from the organization they work for.
Pawar and Charak (2015) define the employee value proposition as the one of a kind arrangement of benefits an employee gets consequently for the skills, capabilities, and experience they convey to an organization.
Your EVP is the core of your Employer Brand and should characterize the substance of your organization and why it is unique.
What’s the difference between your EVP and your Employer Brand?
Put simply, your Employee Value Proposition is internal while your Employer Brand is external. Your Employer Brand is the face your company shows the outside world as a potential employer. It’s the sum of all the different things people think when someone asks them what it would be like to work for Company X or Y. Your EVP, on the other hand, is the face your company shows its employees.
5 Key elements of an Employee Value Proposition:
A strong Employee Value Proposition consists of various elements. Together, these attributes determine how both your employees and candidates will perceive your organization as an employer. Gartner distinguishes the following five key elements of an Employee Value Proposition:
- Compensation
- Work-life balance
- Stability
- Location
- Respect
Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements.
- Compensation:
This attribute, also referred to as compensation and benefits, includes your employees’ satisfaction with their salary, but also additional rewards such as bonuses and aspects such as your evaluation system. Fair and performance-based compensation is one of the 7 HR best practices.
Interestingly, compensation may not be equally important to everyone. There are generational differences in the workforce, with the younger generations valuing for instance development more than the older generations.
Work-life balance:
This is about benefits. Think about everything from paid time off and holidays to flextime options and retirement plans.
When it comes to the kind of benefits employees value most, flexible hours, the opportunity to work from home, vacation time and paid parental leave all rank highly. There’s no magic, one-size-fits-all kind of benefits recipe, however. New parents probably value different benefits than graduates, so try to customize where possible.
Job Security:
Stability or Job Security as in career stability, opportunities for your employees to further their career, develop themselves and employee training. Naturally, this is where your learning and development efforts come into play as well as possible mentoring/coaching initiatives you’ve developed within the organization.
Location:
This component is about much more than the simple location of your office. You could think of it as location in the broadest sense of the word: a positive work environment, a certain level of autonomy, work-life balance, etc.
In fact, the location element has a lot to do with the employee experience which relates to three environments: technology, physical space and culture.
Respect:
Respect is about positive relationships, support, and team spirit, among other things. More than just respect, it’s about your company culture, what are your organization’s core values and beliefs.
Important Note:
In this hard time of COVID-19 where every organization and employee are striving their best to do the best for each other EVPs will surely take their place in organizations because people will tend to go for organizations having best EVPs.