How to build a reward and benefits strategy to complement your EVP
An employee value proposition, or EVP, sits at the intersection of what an employee wants from work and what the organisation needs from them. A strong EVP is when those two things genuinely overlap- when you're offering what actually matters to your people, and your people are motivated to deliver what the business needs.
That's where engagement, retention, performance and discretionary effort live. It isn't a benefits list or a line in a culture deck. It's the answer to a mutual question: why does this relationship work for both of us?
According to Toothfairy research, conducted with YouGov, 21% of all HR and reward and benefits professionals have ‘improving their EVP’ as their top priority in 2026. But the more of these conversations you have, the more one pattern stands out.
Most EVPs look the same
Someone will talk you through their benefits package, genuinely proud of it. Preventive care, wellbeing, flexible working, financial wellbeing, fertility, menopause support, a few extras for senior leadership. Great, right? On the face of it, yes, until the next person describes almost exactly the same thing. And the next.
This isn't laziness. It's a rational consequence of how benefit decisions actually get made. Everyone's reading the same benchmark reports, looking at the same sector peers, responding to the same employee surveys. Drawing from the same inputs means you arrive at the same outputs. Differentiation is the stated goal, but homogeny is the inevitable outcome.
That matters because of the definition we started with. If your EVP is supposed to sit at the intersection of what your employees want and what your organisation needs, but it looks identical to your competitors', then either you and your competitors have exactly the same employees with exactly the same needs, or something has gone wrong in how that insight was gathered and acted on. Usually, it's the latter.
Is benchmarking the problem?
Here's a test worth running: take your actual benefits list and put it next to your closest competitor's, not your aspirational competitor, the one you're actually losing candidates to right now. Look at how much overlaps. For most organisations, the answer is almost all of it, which means what you have isn't really an EVP any more. It's a category problem: when everyone benchmarks against everyone else, things converge.
Real differentiation happens at the edges, in what isn't yet standard or expected.
Dental is one of those edges. Nearly nine out of ten (87%) of employees say dental is essential or a differentiator in a benefits package, a remarkably high number. Yet dental provision as a category has barely moved in over a decade.
According to the survey, 51% of HR decision-makers say employees have already raised dental concerns in the last 12 months, yet 45% of employers still offer no dental provision at all, and 23% say it's because they assume employees "arrange this privately."
Most employers still rely on the NHS, where access has effectively collapsed for working-age adults, or on cash plans and insurance that reimburse treatment after the fact, undoubtedly useful, but little help to someone who can't get an appointment in the first place.
Identifying the value gap
The gap between what employees say they value and what employers are actually doing is wider in dental than almost anywhere else in the benefits stack. Most organisations just haven't connected the two yet. That also makes it one of the last places where a single benefits decision genuinely shifts how employees perceive their employer.
If EVP is genuinely a priority, the question worth sitting with isn't whether your benefits package is good, it probably is. It's whether a candidate, holding your list next to a competitor's, would actually see a difference. If the honest answer is no, that's where to start.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Toothfairy
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