Employee value proposition is a topic that is the top concern of most of the organizations. During a session on Employee Value Proposition (EVP) with Pooja Lal, Head of strategic initiatives at BI WORLDWIDE, we get an insight on what and how to improve EVP. Pooja starts the session by stating "EVP is about attracting the right talent and retaining them so that they become the brand ambassador for your organization. How you place your organization in the market and how you attract talent, plays a key role in the EVP journey."
Each brand is different, and they follow unique cultural values. The first step is formalized EVP and later expressing your proposition through employer brand. Grooming your EVP along with organizational growth is crucial. Organizations must have activation and a sustainment plan that is flexible as their brand evolves. Pooja shared the "Make Every Moment Count" method to drive EVP strategy in the market to attract, engage and retain talent.
Make Every Moment count module
Organizations need to cash on small gestures that make a huge impact and create powerful moments. Pooja refers to them as moment sparklers. Let us dwell a little more on how to create these moments.
Elevation and Pride
- Peak: It is essential to boost or elevate the experience an employee has with the organization. Raising the interest of the audience and peek the excitement of employees to feel and look different.
- Breaking the script: Doing something different than ordinary offers you to keep the environment lively.
- Pride: Regardless of how good we are at a particular skill it is always good to hear praises from others. Hence, multiplying the milestones by transforming a long race into one with many intermediate finish lines. As we finish each line, we experience a burst of pride that charges us to push further and jolt for the next finish line.
Insight and Purpose
Tripping over the truth is a defining moment that can change your view of the world. Leena Nair, CHRO, Unilever explains purpose as, "Brands with purpose grow faster. Companies with a purpose last longer, and people with purpose thrive."
- Stretch for insight: Placing oneself in new situations that pose a risk of failure gives us an idea of our strengths and skills. Mentors help us to stretch ourselves further than we thought we could and at that moment they spark defining moment. To stretch for the insight, they need to add a spark of assurance, direction, and support.
By creating these moments of insight, your employees will live up to your EVP. You will form a bond between leaders and employees. A bond that will encourage employees to stay with the organization for a longer time.
Pooja explains purpose with Aristotle's theory of pursuing happiness. Hedonic which is the moment of pride and self-centred experiences and other is Eudaimonic which is in harmony with one’s inner spirit.
- Pleasure: Pooja explains that Tony Hsieh calls the pleasure moments as rock star moments for they are short-lived
- Passion: Peak performance meets peak engagement leads to passion. Professional athletes call this as being in the zone
- Purpose: Longest lasting happiness is achieved when you have a purpose. Being a part of something bigger than you. Hence, the ultimate goal is to pursue your purpose beyond your passion
Connection and heart
As per Harvard business reviews, those who are happiest in their lives are not the richest or the ones who achieve the most. People possess the greatest link or strength when they have close friends in life. Loneliness was associated with ill health.
- Shared meaning: A sparked moment of connection in groups must create shared purpose. There has to be one cause, one goal and one dream.
- Spectator impact: Result of spectator impact is the impact of the moment and how it creates a ripple in the organization.
- Humans hold the magic: With all the organization going digital. Virtual is more comfortable leaving us isolated and with very little human touch. We need to build a sense of social tranquilities and a sense of belonging. With the help of AI, you can ensure how human contact can be amplified so that your employees can thrive. It depends on the organization to create magical communities in the company.
- STEMpathy: Jobs that have a lot of technical components also benefit more from the heart. These are termed empathy jobs as they combine science, maths, technology, engineering skills with human empathy.
- Emotional infrastructure: Pooja refers to Dr Subroto Bagchi CO-founder of Mindtree statement to give us the perfect example of why organizations need emotional infrastructure. “There are levels of infrastructure in organizations. Physical, digital & intellectual. But neither physical not intellectual infrastructure makes an organization memorable. Emotional infrastructure is what creates a healthy emotional climate within an organization. It is the aggregated positive feeling that employees have for the organization and each other." She states "It is the energy field that makes them go the extra mile, not for monetary gain but their colleagues and the company. It creates a resilient and high performing hold." Corporate culture is very stringent and has a particular functionality that is assigned to people. However, emotional infrastructure showcases the purpose of the work being done.
Make employees thrive
- Survive to thrive: Learning has to be a top motivator for employees and organizations need to thrive for learners and motivate employees towards learning.
- Serial master: Linda Gratton in her book “The Shift” speaks about the serial master. Serial masters are those who have a core of highly valuable skills that they love and around these core skills have rediscovered a lost passion for forming a new mastery. You can create serial masters in an organization by helping employees master one aspect and apply the skill in a completely different project thereby amplifying his contribution.
- IQ EQ CQ PQ LQ: Curiosity quotient explains how individuals can be powerfully motivated to learn about a personally exciting subject whether or not they possess a high IQ. When curiosity is paired with passion or PQ, an individual may acquire mountable knowledge that is greater than a person with high IQ. Encourage employees to experience new things. Learnability quotient helps your workforce to learn new skills and to adapt to new technology and processes. Employers need to recognize and reward learnability as it provides confidence and capability.
Whenever you are designing any new initiative for your employees you should keep these points in mind, it is not necessary to have all four points included but should at least meet any two of the criteria. Many organizations in India have adopted new and innovative ideas that are inspired by “Make Every Moment Count” strategy and have achieved excellent results.