Episode 261: EVP For Talent Attraction & Retention with Joe Morrison, Founder of Cheer At Work

Speaker A: Hello there. Welcome back to Talent and Growth. Today we're joined by Joe Morrison, the founder of Cheer at, uh, Work, a consultancy that's been set up to help companies attract, engage and retain talent with evp. And we're going to be talking all about EVP today. And Joe is kind enough to run us through really a lot of the content he'll go through with a company in workshops with them. So it's kind of free. Uh, material for us is always on talent growth and we can certainly use this to improve EVP in our companies and hopefully we can also attract, engage and retain talent with it. So here's Joe. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Joe, EVP doesn't live in your careers site. What does this mean?

Speaker B: Well, for me, EVP has always been about engaging talent. Um, and I think more recently, and I get why it leans heavily into the talent, um, attraction piece. So when I say when I think it doesn't live in your career site, it's like it's more than just the marketing tool that attracts employees. It can actually be used, powerful tool to engage and retain talent as well. So it's great when it does live in there, but it shouldn't just live in there, if that makes sense.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's got to be, I guess it's got to be something which runs through the business deeply, you know, and it's authentic. And it's not just, it's not just the only, the only thought of it in the careers side. And actually when you get into the business, it's not, it's not practical. Right. It's got to be. It's got to be. You've got to live and breathe the evp.

Speaker B: Yeah. And there's nothing worse. And I've seen this happen before, I won't say where, but when you do this, go on somewhere, go on somewhere, you do this really good work to attract the talent. And it's. And it's. And some fantastic EVPs out there where they do a really good job and then the retention is poor. It's like it shouldn't cause a retention issue. Um, to attract talent shouldn't cause that. So, yeah, I won't name those names, but, uh, there's plenty of them out there. The glassdoor reviews. Reviews normally give it away.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Why do you think so many companies struggle to actually implement their EVP in the manner which we're talking about there? Even if they may have defined it well, like on a careers page? Why do you think the implementation doesn't always kind of ring true.

Speaker B: Uh, it's the action point. So it's a great diagnostics tool is the way I look at it. Um, and it will pull out loads of great stories. When done well, it pulls out loads of great stories from your employees. So whether you're doing focus groups, you're speaking to your whole company, um, you'll get so much information about what's working, what's not. Um, where your strengths, ah, are, where you've got areas to improve. To me it's the, okay, what do you do with that information? Um, yes, it's all well and good, having a nice slogan on your website, but what you're doing to improve the stuff that's not working or what kind of communication are you using internally as well as externally? To me it's that action point. Um, and it can be because of analysis paralysis where you get so much data. It's like, well, where do we start? Um, but equally it shouldn't be difficult. It can be, um, do nothing in some cases, so you might get some information. You tell your employees that actually we're not going to do anything about this and this is why we're not doing anything. Um, do something to take action to improve what you're doing or do better communication. But again, I don't, I don't think there's often, I don't think there's a plan for that to happen or plan to take EVP and do more with it. Um, and that's, it could be time resource, a number of reasons, but that's, it's, it's going ahead and doing it or having the time and effort and energy to do it.

Speaker A: And if we backtrack, let's just really quickly define the actual purpose of an EVP and what, what it is and what it isn't.

Speaker B: Uh, so it depends who you talk to first of all. But I, the way I look at it is there's two EVPs. There's the employer value proposition, which I think is more of the marketing tool, and the employee value proposition, which has the marketing elements to it. But it's part of a culture strategy. Um, to me, the purpose is to attract and retain talent. I, uh, really tried to simplify that in the branding, the messaging that I'm putting out about the services I provide for evp. Um, but attract and retain talent. And the retention bit is how you engage with them. So it's having those conversations, having those discussions. It's that part of evp. So the work that you're doing to uncover the Bit that lives in the website is the employee value proposition as I look at it. Um, but yeah, you'll speak to an uh, employer brand agency and you'll tell them it's the marketing strategy to attract talent. Um, you'll speak to hr, fractional services or even an HR department and they might see it in a slightly different

Speaker A: way and who should own it. Um,

Speaker B: this, this one is debated at length because again going back to uh, that it's a marketing tool, it's an HR culture strategy tool. Um, then if you look at it from an HR perspective, does it live with recruitment because they're the people that are attracting talent and having those conversations, or does it live with HR because they're the ones that are building the job descriptions and how, uh, and strategy for moving forward. Uh, to me, ideal scenario, it's a team effort. So uh, you get support from marketing who know how to attract whatever it might be that you need, but a team effort because what happens is you get these large debates and then nothing gets done at all. So I know it's a bit of a willy answer, but I think it's a combination of marketing, TA and people.

Speaker A: And if you focus, if we hone in on ta, then how can TA teams use EVP to influence decision making across the business?

Speaker B: Uh, I mean it's data first of all, right, so they're going to have some great data from their people. Um, uh, I always recommend doing EVP in a non anonymous format where you're actually having rich converse dialogue conversations with people to get the real data, the real information you need from the data. Um, but the influence comes in the return of investment. So um, I use some stats. So 90, uh, percent of the UK workforce are disengaged. The disengaged employee costs the business £10,000. That's lost productivity, absenteeism, all of that kind of thing. Um, so if you're doing your EVP and you're identifying how many people are engaged or disengaged, then you can show a real roi even with that simple stat. Um, plus there's lost revenue opportunity. I think an actively disengaged person, so someone who uh, is disruptive to your organization. I think it's something like 30% lost revenue opportunity. So you can say well actually uh, in influence you can say well I've got the data to show who's engaged, who's disengaged and what impact that will be if we engage. And equally from a talent attraction perspective you can say, well if we can attract people like the engaged people we have, what impact that's going to have on a business. So short answer data. But there's so much you can take to a cfo, a CEO, or anyone else in a C suite, or even your chief people officer, um, to influence decision making.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, uh, a disruptive person, I think, um, I mean, I'd imagine from my experience the damage a disrupted person can cause if they're disrupting the rest of the business is more than 30%. I've always seen one unhappy person can make four or five other people really unhappy, and one bad performer can make lessen the performance of, you know, top performers as well. It's, uh, it really is a domino effect, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's so many, um, studies across it. There's a one I really like. It's a version of the Jack Welsh, um, analogy where you, you kind of promote the top 10%, the top 20%, you promote the middle 70, you train the bottom 10%, you fire. Which I'm not happy with that one, by the way. But, uh, what I do like is putting that into a boat analogy where you've got your top performers that are one full pelt, bringing that company to where you want to get to. Typically the middle. Well, let's use seven in that scenario that Jack Welch might use are they're doing okay, they're still making you move forward. A person, the disruptive one at the back, is going in the opposite direction, and that is only going to disrupt everyone. You probably still reach your targets. Right? It's. And that's the bit that it's hard when you're saying, well, they're disruptive, but they bring in loads of revenue, as an example, but again, at a detriment to everybody else in that boat. And employees start to realize that they don't want to work with someone who's disruptive. They don't want to be in that boat with that person who's causing them mayhem. Um, but equally, they understand a business doesn't want that either. I don't think there's any business that wants that disruptive person in boat. And worse still, that person in the back doesn't really want to be there, clearly, because they want to go somewhere else. Um, and I've often done that with teams is to try and give them a visual on, okay, what does that actually look like for you? Where are you on that boat? Ah. And where do you want to be? And what does that do for you as well?

Speaker A: Well, let's talk about I know you've got a framework for bringing EVP into business decisions. So do you want to kind of break this down for us and walk us through it?

Speaker B: Yeah, this works for small companies, large companies, you'd vary how you would implement it accordingly. Um, but I'd start with leaders. So what I'd like to do is get the leaders in the room, as many as possible. Um, and the idea of that session is to educate on evp, um, but get together a list of offerings that you have as a business. Temptation is to say benefits and reward, but it's beyond that. So benefits and reward, you thinking salary, um, commission, healthcare, all of those wonderful things. Why I say offerings is because you're thinking, well, relationship with a manager, uh, one to one meetings, performance reviews, um, all of those other things that a business does. Ah, and why that? Because actually some people don't uh, enjoy working a company because they don't get enough time with their manager. So they might say, that's something I don't get in a company, why I might want to move somewhere else. Or the opposite might be they'd get too much time with a manager and they want something that's a bit more hands off or less micromanagement. But the idea of doing that is leaders, getting them in a room and get them thinking about all of the things you actually offer as a business. So what you're doing there is you're giving them more, um, levers to pull. So if somebody's asking for a pay rise and the business can't offer it, but actually there's three or four other things that you can really lean into. It gives them that plus that bit of buy in. So if you're rolling this out after with the rest of the company, you've got that buy in of leadership. So do that first. Map them out. I map them out into seven pillars. So some EVPs have five pillars of four or eight minus seven. So uh, brand, culture, environment, monetary prospects, relationships, well being, I think I've got them all in there. Um, put all of those offerings into categories. Uh, then I take those to employees. And again another education piece on evp. The seven pillars, the offerings that you have as a business go beyond salary, um, so doing a bit of education there. But what I do, and I've done this literally with cards, so I've printed cards off of all of these offerings, ah, like playing card size and ask them to map out on a table. So literally put your cards on the table. I've used that line as cheesy as it is and say, how good is this offering on 1 axis versus how important is this offering on the other side? So they're literally mapping out everything you offer as a business, how good it is. Um, anything on the left hand side. So anything that's not important, you can straight away say to them, well look, don't worry about this stuff if you've got a dress code, but actually it's not that important, forget about it, don't worry about it, don't moan about it. Bottom right, they find is anything that is really important to that person. But we're not delivering as a business. Well, actually that's your risk of losing an employee. Now you say to employer, these are the things we want to improve. This is the stuff that we want to do better. It might be that we can't change things because we've got other priorities or it might mean that we can communicate better that offering to help you understand it more, um, or improve what that offering is. And then the powerful bit that really works with employees, when I've done this before, is you pick up, literally pick the cards up the top right hand corner. So that's your evp. So that's what we're good at and that's what's important to you. So that's why you come to work. They're the things that are really important. And why you use those two axes is, uh, how important is the, uh, happiness or how you feel about things and how good is the kind of engagement? The brain, what do we think about these things? Um, and that typically is the bit that engages most with when you're doing the exercise. Now what I'm building with cheer that the company have set up is a survey where you can do that and it maps out that data so you can have that data and segment it. So you know, what do marketing think compared to finance sales versus et cetera? Um, you can segment by leadership versus employees. And it's, and it's all positive information. It's not like a negative glass door review, um, or anonymous. You're having these conversations and you're having that dialogue and you understand, okay, what's making our people tick. Um, and again, small scale. You can literally, you can do it yourself. You can write them on little cue cards and do it that way, uh, through to, if you've got the technology or the software engineers or go to me, we'll get that built and do it in a more um, analytical way.

Speaker A: And what's one mistake you see companies make when they Try and roll out EVP beyond, I guess the people who are responsible for it, the employee brand

Speaker B: team say, uh, I know it kind of touches upon the question we spoke about earlier. Often it's, uh, not communicating what's happening with employees. So I've seen it in a different engagement initiative. Um, typically engagement surveys or post surveys where they're done online and a big complaint from employees is, well, they don't see the benefits of it, they don't see any change, they don't see the impact when it might have been simple to say, well, we're not planning to change this. And this is the reason why. Now sometimes there's a hesitance of businesses to do that. They don't want to say, well, we're not doing anything about a topic that might be important to some people. But like, people are smart, people get it. People understand a business can't do everything for them. Um, but to show that they're being listened to and show that being heard is the point of this exercise. Um, and if I give you a second example, because I know that touches upon what we said earlier is often businesses try to put a metric on happiness itself or engagement itself. Um, so give an engagement score or EMPS score is the one that I found. It's good to show some impact, but really it's about having those conversations and having those opportunities. So I'd rather a business as well. We plan to do four sessions, uh, throughout a year that's going to engage with our employees rather than say, well, this session is going to go from X to Y. Uh, because happiness and engagement is like, it's, it's not linear, it goes up and down. It's not, it doesn't, um, it's not as simple as it's going to be a six one day and an eight the next. So, yeah, I think, well, it's two. You asked for one, I gave you two.

Speaker A: Appreciate that. Two. Two for one. Love it. Just to wrap it up, what's one piece of advice you'd give to a company that has a shiny EVP deck but no idea there to implement? No idea how to implement it?

Speaker B: Um, well, like to me it's the idea, the ideas and how to do it should be in the results of an evp. Um, and often it's, it's businesses look for, well, how are we going to do this? Where are we going to do it? Actually, if you've, if you've done an EVP with your employees and had those conversations, you can go back to those employees and say, well, look, this is what you said. Does this match? This is our perception of what you said. Does it match? Um, and open that dialogue up again. It's often felt like, okay, you've gathered all this information, you've spoke to employees, you've done all this work. Now we have to do it all ourselves. And ourselves is usually one person in HR or one person in marketing who might not have employer brand as their, as their, uh, main piece of work. But actually, no, you don't have to do that. You can get people involved again. You can go back out and find the way that's going to work to communicate. Um, but, yeah, I guess the advice is that communication piece, I think that's usually where I've seen, where they've done really well or they've fallen behind.

Speaker A: Love it. Joe, thank you so much for being a part of talent and growth.

Speaker B: No worries. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much. Paul,

Speaker A: Thank you for locking on today. Uh, if you enjoyed the show, even if you didn't, drop me a note at paulalent and growth.co.uk and if you're interested in being a guest or you know somebody who would be a great guest also, do let me know. See you next time.