Delivering & Exploring Employer Branded Experiences

So – you have begun your own company-wide introspection to define your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Maybe you’ve already got the definition agreed upon and you’re ready to release it into the world. Before you start printing out posters, it’s first time to think about the actual delivery and communication of these concepts and how you’re intending on conveying them to your workforce. In other words, how to articulate and bring your EVP to life.

Essentially, a company’s EVP is the employment offering between employer and employee; the employer’s commitment to help satisfy what employees need and want from their work, in exchange for their daily efforts and energy towards the organisation’s goals.  While all organisations have an EVP, not all intentionally define, shape and formalise it into strategy.

Furthermore – and a key differentiating factor – not many organisations go as far as articulating and delivering their EVP into actual, lived ‘people experiences’. Experiences that are unique to your organisation and represent company identity, goals, mission, values and norms. Learning paths, development opportunities, flexible working environments – the attractive offering or incentive that makes people want to work for you, and want to keep working for you. In many cases, the best starting point for translating values from their broad definitions, into executable, comprehensible approaches and behaviours for employees to adopt is often through your EVP, by setting, establishing and managing expectations and desired behaviours from the start of their journey with you.

Employees who can effectively understand and embody company values make excellent brand advocates and ambassadors, championing initiatives and promoting services. But, of course, the relationship works both ways. While it is valuable to establish how an employee can take on core company values and work within the EVP, it is also crucial to remember companies are judged against their own EVP too.

These “people experiences” range across the employee life-cycle touch points, taking place through the key, daily tasks, activities and processes that seem small or routine or even mundane, but add up to move an organisation closer to its goals. As a result, these small events can serve more than their original, purely functional purpose. They are also moments where employees, partners, prospects, clients and customers all interact with your organisational brand, and through those interactions people will appraise or reflect on whether their experiences with you truly align with the commitments you claim to stand for. And depending on what judgement they reach, they will determine whether they reciprocate value (e.g. employees giving discretionary effort).

Being able to manage and articulate your employer brand ensures you are in the best position to attract, engage and retain the people needed. It’s about standing out from your competition and communicating a consistent EVP in experiential terms. For example, this could be about providing a rich, realistic preview into your organisational norms during employee attraction, to training and ongoing reinforcement for how staff should handle customer communications during service disruptions.

Taking the familiar employee life-cycle, here are some example ideas to illustrate how you can articulate and bring an EVP to life:

Attracting Talent

• Create ‘day in the life of’ role-play scenarios or simulations, played out through a working day narrative with the prospect in control, can provide realistic job or company previews. Not only do they support job-role fit & encourage self-selection in prospects not aligned to your company EVP & role, they are creative opportunities to articulate your identity, values and norms.

Recruiting the Right People

• Two personal selection methods, situational-judgement tests and assessment centres, can provide an opportunity to communicate your EVP to candidates. Situational scenarios and assessment centre exercises designed with familiar contexts in which assessed competencies are performed in, offer another opportunity to reinforce organisation EVP and brand to candidates.

Onboarding with a Difference

• Preboarding and onboarding of new starters need to provide role clarity, socialisation, organisational knowledge and reduce any shock factors.
• Technology can allow onboarding to begin before day 1, allowing new starters to connect with new and existing employees, to learn and assimilate company & role specific knowledge, to experiencing case studies in narrative-driven experiences. If designed well, these can support new starters time-to-proficiency.

Helping Your People Perform & Develop

• Feedback and recognition mechanisms, powered by technology, allowing managers and peers to applause and recognise values-based behaviours can reinforce EVP-based behavioural norms.
• The use of quick ‘pulse’ crowd-suggestion, voting and feedback mechanisms can provide feedback opportunities for employees, customers to clients. This data can provide insights into whether your EVP commitments are being delivered consistently across your employee and customer interaction points.
• Games-based learning and simulation games can be designed specifically around learning objectives and within highly-contextual, employer-branded experiences. These simulations can serve to promote the relevance of training to employees and encourage its transfer back into working environments.

If you’re interested in doing something to impact and support your organisation’s EVP, why not get in touch and see what we could create for you? info@motivait.net