How to build an employee value proposition that focuses on improving employee engagement
1. Employee engagement starts with employees
If you want your employee engagement strategy to really work and add value to your EVP, you need to listen to what your employees want first. It can be hard to understand whether your strategy is working, but if you start by asking your employees what they actually want and would use, then you’re off to the right start. It’s also a great way to get your baseline so that you can make any initiative truly measurable.
Five steps to creating an employee engagement survey that adds value:
- Get leadership buy in – the best engagement with the survey itself will come from endorsement from the entire business. Get the strongest results by communicating from the top down.
- Set objectives – what do you want to learn from this? In this case, it might be quite clear what you want to achieve.
- KISS – don’t worry, this is actually just a great guiding principle for designing a survey effectively. Keep it simple, stupid. An overly complicated survey is just going to lose people. Also keep it short, let there be no reason for staff to not complete it.
- Share the results – make sure all those involved internally understand the results of the survey and that they need to keep it at the forefront of their minds.
- Take action – this is the key here, get the results and take action on what you find. This is the best way to build an engagement strategy that will actually work.
2. Don’t try and create an emotional connection the cheesy way
So often employee engagement tactics start with the greatest intentions but miss the mark completely. A manufacturer in the US, who shall remain unnamed, decided to implement a smile jar system in the workplace. Employees were encouraged to put a dollar in the jar every time they were caught not smiling. Needless to say, it did not have the desired effect.
Think about a product or service that you use in your life that’s genuinely made your life easier. You probably feel pretty good about that product and the company that makes it. The same goes for engaging employee benefits. By providing employees with a simple, practical solution that can help improve their lives they’re going to start feeling the same way about you, the employer, who provides it for them. Therefore, a practical tool that has the power to create an emotional connection will add immense value to your EVP.
3. Make sure it’s applicable and available to the wider business
It’s simple maths really, the more people that can utilise the benefits you implement, the more it’s going to be applicable to anyone you’re trying to hire. A cycle to work scheme is worth having, however it’s only applicable to a small set of candidates that are in cycling distance of the office. To compliment these types of employee benefits it’s good to have something in place that is consistently available to the entire workforce.
At every step you want to be making measured and researched additions to your EVP. You will quickly be able to see what’s working when your recruitment process starts to become a little easier.
This article is provided by Wagestream.
In partnership with Wagestream
Wagestream’s financial wellbeing platform makes work more rewarding for 3 million people.
