Reimagining The Employee-Employer Deal
What Job Do Your Employees Hire You To Do?
Earlier this year, I wrote about 7 ideas worth exploring to reimagine the world of work. One of those ideas was Rethinking The Employer Value Proposition.
I wrote:
We’ve come on a long journey with our conversation on the employee value proposition, and it’s time to move to the next stage. Having an employer brand is now table stakes, but what companies are learning is that A) simply having a glassdoor page isn’t enough and B) Having an employer brand isn’t a one shot deal. Employer Brand started as an offshoot of a company brand, and the fundamental principles of brand marketing and customer loyalty. The good news is, we can draw upon these principles to shift the conversation as a result of the retention challenges companies are facing today as well as the quickly evolving labor and talent markets.
Every day, we go to work, and we do so for a reason. We give up our time, talent, and energy which is put to use in our job and for our employer, and in exchange, we get a bunch of things. Tactically, a paycheck, benefits, and something to do each day.
But philosophically, each individual also gets out a whole bunch of other things. Depending on who you are, that might be something like meaning, purpose, excitement, connection, a chance to do something each day, etc.
At the core, this is the fundamental employer-employee deal. This is what we sign up for when we take a job and build a career, in its simplest form.
Jobs to Be Done - The Employee-Employer Edition
With Jobs to Be Done Theory, the late Dr. Clayton Christensen popularized the theory that people buy products to solve problems they have.
On the same line of thinking, Dart Lindsley, a Cisco and Google Leader and The Host of the Work For Humans podcast, offers to us that we can use Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done framework to the way we think about our work.
I am paraphrasing a bit here, but Dart often says that “all of us hire our jobs to solve problems for us that we have that we want to solve.” For some, that is financial, for others, it might be purpose or a higher calling. But regardless of what it is, we all have our own reasons for why we “hire” our jobs and companies to “work” for us.
A key question he suggests to his guests are: what job do you hire to allow you to do? (It’s worth pondering if you haven’t…)
The Rise of Employer Branding and the Employee Value Proposition
Somewhere along the way, my guess is the early 2000s, companies woke up to the fact that in order to attract and find the best candidates for their jobs, they needed to get the word out there in the market about who their company was, and why it was beneficial for a prospective candidate to “hire” that company. And thus, the concept of employer branding was born.
According to Built In, “Employer branding is the process of managing and influencing your reputation as an employer among job seekers, employees and key stakeholders.”
Much like a company or product brand, being able to make your employer brand visible and known ensures you are attracting and bringing in the right candidates to come work for you.
Employer Branding started becoming a thing during the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, which emphasized the importance of having a digital footprint to scale your reach and find/hire the best candidates possible.
Central to going through employer branding exercises and executing specific marketing and communications campaigns to make your employer brand known (ex: website, social media, Glassdoor page, etc) is actually being able to offer something that attracts the right people to come work for your company. And this is where having an employer value proposition comes into play.
Minchington (2005) defines an” Employee Value Proposition (EVP) as a set of associations and offerings provided by an organization in return for the skills, capabilities and experiences an employee brings to the organization.”
The thinking is this - put together a compelling value proposition for why an employee should work there (ex: what they get in exchange for their talents and skills) and then find the best possible candidates who want what you’re serving.
As this is happening, so are structural evolutions brought on by technology, culture, and workforce models, which all impact and intersect with this trend. For example:
Technology
Glassdoor: Founded in 2007, Glassdoor promoted transparency and reviews making it much more accessible to find out what a company was like before taking a job, which also made companies be more honest about themselves (in some ways..)
LinkedIn: Founded in the early 2000s, Linekdin made it significantly easier to find jobs and careers and build relationships right from your iphone.
Social Media: with the rise of pages, profiles, handles and user generated content, companies now had to have a digital presence and directly engage with candidates, and share information and grow their employer brand
Culture
From a cultural and societal perspective (this post is mostly geared toward North America) we began to see even more shifts, including:
An importance and focus on issues like Diversity, equity and inclusion, ESG, well-being, and leaders taking public stances on social issues
A stronger interest in finding meaning and purpose out of a job and career
The definition, rise, and push back of hustle culture
A desire and need for alternative ways of thinking about career development
Workforce
A desire to focus on hiring for skills versus degrees
A rise in alternative workforce models, including gig work, freelancers, fractional executives, and talent marketplaces
More and more companies pushing purpose, meaningful work
5 Generations in the Workforce, and our newest (Gen Z) entering and oldest (Baby Boomers) exiting
While most of these were trends long before COVID-19, for many reasons, like other things, the pace and scale of these trends were 10x’ed as a result of a global pandemic. And 3 years later, I’m here to suggest that while the shifts and impacts of these trends are well documented and known, they have not necessarily made their way to changing the way we think about the value proposition that companies put forth to their employees, and the broader relationship of the employer-employee deal.
The Rise of the EVP of Mission, Meaning, Nap Pods, and Eventual Pushback
Once upon a time, when we talked about the employer branding and employee value proposition conversation, companies were in one of two camps
Camp #1: The Google’s Meta’s and predominately tech companies of the world who were offering amenity after amenity to attract and retain their top talent. As a result, you get nice offices, free meals, ping pong tables and nap pods
Camp #2: The companies who wanted to be Camp #1 but couldn’t
For years, much of the value proposition from EVPs came back to the actual office itself, in the form of perks and amenities. The office, and the “where” of work has changed significantly over the past three years. Free food isn’t so great when you can’t work in the office due to a global pandemic!
But pandemic aside, I sensed a shift in employee sentiment even before the pandemic around the types of benefits and value propositions that employers were trotting out to employers.
After a decade of promises of “meaningful work,” “change the world,” and “free food and uber’s home,” many people realized what they were getting in exchange for what they were doing was not necessarily what they expected when they “hired” their job, nor what they wanted.
Reimagining The Employee-Employer Deal: What Do Your Employees Hire You For?
Recently, a number of companies have made headlines around what they were doing to encourage and entice their people to come back into the office.
While some of these things are just bad decisions, what they actually are to me are clues that employers don’t actually understand their end of the bargain of the employee value proposition. In Christensen or Dart’s words, they don’t actually understand what problems their employees are trying to solve by “hiring” their specific job.
Implicit in this is two things. First, that a company actually understands what its value proposition is, and second, that it acknowledges that the reason why an employee hires a company is going to be different on an employee to employee basis.
But I think that concept helps us understand and makes us more informed about why some employers seem to be missing the mark.
These are all reasons why I think if companies want to improve the way they attract and retain their employees, they need to first understand the shifts, and new ideas that are present but not widely accepted for how we (a collective we) think and evaluate why we hire our jobs, careers in this new world of work.
It’s also why I have been banging the drum so much from people whose ideas I think are reshaping the world of work, people like Steve Cadigan, Christina Wallace, Simone Stolzoff, Khe Hy, Paul Millerd, Lindsey Pollak, Jenny Blake and Kathy Oneto.
Instead of offering another incentive, rolling out another program, or having another webinar, or whatever other incentive you have to force employees to come to the office, my suggestion is that companies start by taking the time to actually ask questions to better understand what their employees want out of their jobs, and how that might help them reimagine the employee-employee deal the make with their employees.
In a new world of work, it would be amazing to see some employers with the following employee value propositions:
A company where you can do the best and most challenging work of your career
A company where you can have the best possible manager to help you grow yourself and your career
A company where you can get the skills & education you need to transfer into your next career
A company with people who will make you smarter
You may not have full control over these decisions, so what I would offer you is to reflect on the following questions to better understand what you want out of your own employee-employer deal:
What is the reason why you chose to work at your current employer?
What do you hire your job, and your career to give to you?
To what extent do you expect your work to give you meaning and purpose (if any?)
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, team meetings or professional development for next year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: career development, influence without authority, effective relationship building, and stakeholder management
Support Your Offsites & Meetings: Speak or facilitate at your team’s offsite. Need a guide to facilitate or speak at an upcoming offsite, QBR or all hands? Happy to engage here.
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al