The Employer Branding and EVP landscape today 24 In a departure from the 2021 survey, we introduced an open text format for the final two questions on our study. The first one touched on the challenges our participants anticipated over the next 12 months for their EVPs. There were perhaps no surprises that challenges over budgets for the coming year featured regularly within these comments. The ability to forge a compelling and successful internal business case remains a challenge for the sector – and a challenge related to issues around formal metrics which influence at leadership levels. Over and above this, two key themes emerged as negatively impacting our participants’ ability to deliver the EVP they want. Firstly, was their inability to embed their EVP internally, to successfully engage employees with the EVP. Again, this relates to scenarios whereby the EVP can feel an alien construct, developed elsewhere with very little relationship to a particular site, country or language. Similarly, the EVP can feel top down, the product and influence of senior leaders, but with little connection with the majority of employees. The second key element emerging combines two themes and the balance to be achieved. Many organisations are struggling with consistency – their EVP lacks coherence in certain situations, its delivery deviates from its original source. The other side of this, and one cited by a number of our survey, is about the introduction of greater flexibility. For example, certain UK professionals were struggling with how to adapt a US-centric EVP which culturally wasn’t engaging with local audiences. The balance, then, of flexibility and consistency is an on-going debate for EVP owners. Our final question of our, very patient, participants asked them to suggest one initiative that would enhance their EVP and EB activities. Whilst the issue of budget was fairly common, more relevant was the size of team. Clearly, there was often a relationship between the two (but not always). Finding bandwidth and headcount to deliver on the potential of EVP remains a challenge. Ironically, as the possibilities of EVP expand, then this places greater demands on those seeking to deliver it. Again, and particularly at a time when headcounts will be under the financial microscope, the ability to make the case for expanding the team responsible for delivering EVP is so important. This perhaps makes the idea of combining internal comms with EVP even stronger. Other fascinating ideas that came out of these responses largely touched on creating greater internal connection with the EVP. People are interested in internal training for employees in order to create greater connection and greater potential advocacy for the EVP – what is it, how was it developed and what can we do with it? The use of an external partner to help construct the EVP remains valid. It would make sense for more internal people to be aligned to how to optimise the EVP within an organisation. There was, as well, real interest in employee content generation capabilities. How can organisations generate people stories at pace and deliver them to the appropriate communications channels – whether this be a careers site or social media or the intranet. It can feel as though the mechanics around such a logical initiative do not move as efficiently as possible right now.
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