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At too many companies, employee engagement is broken.
What began as a great idea – methodically attending to what people need to be most effective on the job – has become at many enterprises a hodgepodge of perfunctory surveys, consultant malpractice, and fear-mongering.
The turning point for one of these initiatives comes when it is, as one HR executive whispered to me, “weaponized” – used not as a means of focusing where the company must do better, but to identify and drive out people who express legitimate concerns. People who don’t give high enough marks on the all-important company surveys get labeled “brats,” “under-achievers,” “delinquents,” “drifters,” “saboteurs,” “cynics,” “martyrs,” “hamsters,” “honeymooners,” “crash & burners,” or “prisoners.” (All these disparagements and more are in the publications of engagement consultancies.)
Not surprising in the barrage of insults, one-third of employees now either skip the survey or give false answers. As I wrote two years ago in this space, the contamination of a worthy concept threatens the end of “employee engagement.”
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What can save it? It will take a lot. The effects of a decade or more of bad strategy won’t easily dissipate.
But there is a concept reemerging that just might get things realigned. “Employee value proposition” has been kicking around since the late 1990s. It was featured prominently as a solution to what was then being called the “war for talent.”
“Your company needs a strong employee value proposition – a compelling answer to the question, ‘Why would a highly talented person choose to work here?’” wrote Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod in their 2001 book The War for Talent.
Perhaps because a tight labor market is making it hard to find and keep great workers, employee value proposition appears to be gaining traction again. EVP could be dismissed as just the latest three-letter acronym in the rotation were it not for several key aspects that help a company sharpen its strategy for improving its working relationship with its people.
In this case, borrowing from the customer side is instructive.
EVP is copy-and-paste terminology from the marketing department’s “customer value proposition.” In most cases, drawing parallels between customer and employee disciplines is foolish; the relationship with a customer who spends one hour in the store per month making requests is radically different from the employee who spends 160 times longer in the store fielding requests. But here, it works. Over the long term, just like customers, employees do have a choice. It’s in the company’s interest to obsess a bit over why they would stay or go.
“Every company has a customer value proposition; it is a clear, compelling reason why customers should do business with them,” wrote Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod. “Few companies are nearly as thoughtful about why talented managers should join and stay with them. However, the new battlefield is as much for talented people as it is for key customers. Companies need to apply the same rigor to people management as they do to customer management.”
EVP puts the burden on the company, not the employee.
The stronger side always sets the tone for a working relationship. And the research is clear that the vast majority of employees are “engageable.”
When employees have supportive managers, are well compensated and well recognized, are not burned out by excessive demands, have transparent and passionate leadership, and get opportunities for professional growth, they become loyal workers. Deprived of these kinds of experiences at work, they become frustrated until they can quit. It’s that simple.
Over time and in the hands of some consultants who demonized frustrated employees to top executives, the term “employee engagement” allowed the burden to be shifted to the employee. He or she was expected to “be engaged.” If he or she was not, rather than the company questioning itself, the employee was deemed to have a character flaw.
The term “employee value proposition” properly puts the burden on the company to develop a proposition of value to the people it needs. For this reason, EVP might just be the most important fix that employee engagement needs.
EVP begins not with a survey, but with fundamental questions.
Employee engagement initiatives are too anchored to the big annual survey. Those surveys are the centerpiece of what engagement consultancies sell to their clients. Subsequent attempts at making improvements are – to borrow a term from a confidant whose company was suffering through one of these – “episodic.” Managers who know the survey is coming start paying more attention to their staffs, then wait in fear for the results. Executives pay attention to the issues only after the results come in, then go quiet for the rest of the year.
EVP starts with that almost existential question: Why would the people we need want to join, do their best work here, and stay? “A value proposition represents the psychological framework human beings use to make decisions,” said University of Louisville Associate Professor Brad Shuck. “It is the why of the relationship.” One can’t answer these kinds of questions without developing some expertise in behavioral economics, without decoding the unique patterns that emerge within the organization, and most important, without some introspection.
Before long, decision-makers start asking important questions about working at the firm: Are we doing anything that is disconnecting employees from their natural connection to the company mission? Are we transparent enough? Is this a cool place to work? Are we needlessly worrying them? What is our reputation? Are we asking them to make bad tradeoffs between their work and personal lives? Are they happy?
If executives follow through, they start making decisions welcomed by the employees. The company becomes a demonstrably better place to work.
In an EVP approach, surveys of various shapes and sizes are integral to learning what employees want, what’s working and what’s not. But those surveys are subordinate to the larger initiative, not the first thing people associate with it.
Just like a customer value proposition, an employee value proposition is targeted.
Whether on the customer or employee side, no company can be all things to all people. A good customer value proposition is drafted around the interests of a constrained target market. Nordstrom aims to reach a different demographic market with different brand promises than does Cabela’s. There are common factors, of course – quality products, crisply organized displays, attentive front-line people, and such – but no one would confuse which is the better place to get a bow tie and which is the better place to find a duck call.
Likewise, employees differ in the kinds of experiences they seek in their careers. There are common aspects that make a great job for an aerospace engineer and an advertising project manager, but the combination and high points that best motivate each are unique. A good EVP is targeted to the priorities of the kinds of people the organization needs.
EVP looks at the company through the eyes of prospective and former employees.
Because engagement initiatives are anchored to the employee survey, they are focused almost exclusively on current employees. The executive briefings on the results include no data on the perceptions of those the company wants to hire or those it lost.
The importance of compensation, for example, tends to be underestimated in employee survey analyses because, by definition, they include only those at least satisfied enough with the company’s pay to still be at the organization. The talented people who took higher wages elsewhere are not part of the analysis because they are no longer employees. It’s a bit like the old joke of looking for your lost keys not where you dropped them but under the streetlamp because the light is better there.
Marketing people don’t have these blinders. They’re always obsessing over how everyone in their target market feels about the brand, especially those shopping at competitors. Because of its roots in a marketing concept, EVP includes attention to the broad “employer brand” in a way engagement work never has. This is especially important now that sites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor allow people considering a job at a company to get inside information from current and former employees.
Like engagement, EVP takes a holistic view of the relationship between people and the places where they work.
Some of the most interesting discoveries in the engagement arena have been over what non-financial and non-traditional aspects make for a great job. Although these have sometimes led to goofy misinterpretations, such as asking people if they have “a best friend at work,” the persistent curiosity about what matters most to employees has been exceptionally healthy.
An EVP is the complete offering a company makes to its prospective employees in hopes they will join and to current employees in return for staying, for giving their best efforts, and in hopes they will speak well of the organization once they’ve moved on.
If it's important to the employee, everything from mentoring to foosball tables to how frequently managers email on weekends falls within the proposition. “In some ways, it’s like a psychological contract, but it’s broader than that. It’s the entire employee experience of being at work,” said Dr. Shuck. “Those decisions regarding the value proposition are made moment to moment, and these experiences build over time into a cumulative thing we call the employee value proposition.”
By taking in the full sweep of a person’s connection to a company, EVP is a better strategic approach than many initiatives that are targeted on just a few aspects of working at the organization.
Done right, an EVP culminates in a focus on the happiness of employees. What do employees value most? BI Worldwide’s research shows it’s happiness. Hardly a new concept, but no less powerful for wear. Combine the 12 aspects that the research identified as being most connected to employee performance and you discover you’re not just in the business of “engaging” employees, but of making them happy.
No one outside the corporate EVP team is going to say “employee value proposition” in a conversational sentence. That’s okay. It would be a little weird if they did. EVP is the strategic framework for ensuring the company delivers experiences that employees will talk about in synonyms for happiness. Happiness is the ultimate employee value proposition.
There is no magic spell cast by invoking the three words. EVP holds promise because of its roots, its breadth, the responsibility it puts on companies, and because the demand for workers in many fields is so intense now that businesses ignore it at their peril. It could be called “Project X” or “Operation Reciprocity” and still work just as well if it delivers what employees truly value.
What’s important is that the company discharges its responsibilities in such a way that when an employee thinks about her work, she thinks about her breakthroughs, her great colleagues, her fantastic manager, her genuine leaders, and all the other reasons that make someone talented chose to join and stay at a company. Given how much of a person’s waking hours are spent on the job and how much of most people’s egos are wrapped up in their professions, that is no small proposition.
