Employee Value Proposition – Nature vs. Nurture

 EVP – an evolutionary mechanism for talent acquisition and organisational performance

Employee Value Proposition is one of those acronyms that can lose meaning every time it’s said or written. It easily becomes a ‘function of recruitment’, something that gets promoted whenever there is a talent acquisition drive and is dragged out for the Annual Report, but not much else.

EVP has the capacity to be much more than this – just as new communication systems, from the iWatch to Google Glass are set to disrupt the way we do everything from getting up in the morning to planning our futures, EVP can serve as a disrupter of management – a spur and a probe of the talent system and a re-dedicator and re-confirmer of organisational progress and individual development.

 

The EVP gap

All too often EVP becomes a tool to analyse nature: a simply mechanistic process by which an organisation defines its own needs and measures applicants against those needs to find the closest match. This failure to utilise EVP as a developer, nurturer and sharpener of ability can occur because the organisational culture has become a filter – those who don’t seem to get on in the organisation are seen as ‘not fitting in’. This is the result of an overweighting of the word Employee and an underweighting of Value and Proposition.

For EVP to deliver its full potential it needs to be seen as a contributor to the mission statement of the entire organisation and as a channel of communication with employees, shareholders, investors, customers, partners … the value of any company is the proposition it makes, and delivers on, to the world as a whole. EVP is a significant part of this value, and every employee has the potential to be an ambassador and a recruiter if they are properly integrated into the EVP.

 

EVP – profiling progress, not candidates

Using the EVP as a template against which to measure the talent agenda and ‘hire potential’ is just a starting point. EVP is a way of encapsulating ‘who you are’ ,whether you call that a brand, a corporation, an institution or just ‘a team’. This means EVP contains the DNA of your mission. That mission could be gaining market share for a new brand, taking over a major rival for a corporation, building a supranational partnership for an institution or meeting that year’s targets for a team. From vital first steps to vast ambition, the passion that drives mission achievement can only come from sourcing the right people, bonding them to the mission through enthusiasm, and resourcing them to turn their enthusiasm into results.

 

Fast moving systems and resilience through EVP

Increasingly, organisations have to move rapidly. Long term strategic objectives must be maintained in the face of a global marketplace that is regularly perturbed by events outside the scope of any enterprise. From terrorist attacks to natural disasters, from leadership in crisis situations through to prudent planning for the future, any organisation may face the need to alter direction, tactically or strategically.

If the EVP is flexible and strong, it can carry the enterprise through periods of rapid change by recruiting new talent required to master the present circumstances, and by re-dedicating existing talent by recommitting it to the organisation’s primary purposes via the current situation.

Ultimately, EVP is nature, a story board. What does EVP really mean as a nurturing tool?

With 100 of Africa’s top HR professionals in attendance and key speakers from some of the continent’s biggest brands, Recruiting Excellence for Africa is a must attend event shaping and investigating the recruitment process in top African businesses. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in some of the most cutting edge discussions revolving around the HR industry.

To find out more please visit our Talent Agenda 2014 Johannesburg website.

The Selection for Culture Stream is sponsored by      

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