Employee Engagement Trends 2017

As you work to continually improve and advance your organization, consider the fivetrends outlined here.

The Employee Value Proposition

The employee value proposition (EVP) has become a prominent focus at many
top companies.

An EVP is defined as: the complete offering a company makes to its prospective and current employees in return for their best efforts. It encompasses pay and benefits, all of the non-financial aspects of the company’s culture that attract, retain and motivate employees and the reasons former employees would speak well of the company.

How is an EVP different from engagement?

Employee engagement applies only to the period when a person is an employee. But a well-implemented EVP strategy considers how the company is perceived before, during and after employment, thus taking a broader view of the employee relationship. The EVP tends to be less episodic than engagement initiatives, which are often linked to annual surveys. And the EVP puts the burden on the company to offer the work, opportunities, culture and benefits of greatest value to the employee.

In the last decade, traditional employee engagement programs increasingly blamed “disengaged” employees for having bad attitudes, despite evidence that the vast majority of people will be “engaged” if the company provides a desirable culture and environment, attentive and supportive managers, work-life balance, teamwork, a promising future and other reasonable requirements for a good job.

Now let’s talk a bit about culture.

Culture can be informally defined as “the way things work around here.” Specifically, it includes the values, beliefs, artifacts and rewards that influence people’s day-to-day behavior. When a company’s culture is clearly aligned with its business strategy, it attracts people who feel comfortable in it, which in turn should produce a high level of engagement (informally defined as “the way I feel about the way things work around here”). When culture and strategy are aligned, companies can show as much as 50% differential in performance.