authenticity

Across EVP and Employer Branding, we talk, rather at length, about authenticity. It’s not that it’s not an important concept and it’s not that it’s not exactly what people audiences want to see and experience. It’s more that it’s in danger of becoming something of a truism. Self-evident, somewhat obvious and apparently unchallengeable. 

But let’s do some challenging and apply a little more nuance. 

The route to any EVP and Employer Brand is through an organisation’s people. EVP specialists will spend time listening to what employees have to say about the culture, the potential, the opportunities, the direction, the passion, the purpose and the investment provided by their employer. They’ll tell their stories touching on what that organisation has done to support their journey. They’ll tell their stories about how they’ve grown with their employer. They’ll tell the authentic story of their time with the organisation. 

They’ll tell those stories, they’ll give their opinions and views from their perspective. They’ll apply their own authenticity. 

Evolving authenticity

But it’s an authenticity with context. Perhaps the context of working for that organisation for a number of years. They’ve seen changes during that time, some good, some not so much. If they tell you via focus groups, surveys and interviews that the culture is changing, becoming, for example, more professional, does that mean we can authentically state that the culture is professional? What if new people join, perhaps attracted to this apparent professionalism and find that whilst it may be increasing, it’s some way from the professionalism they are used to at previous organisations. 

Ask employees to describe their present-day employment experience and they cannot help but do it through the lens of their overall experience. The culture might, for them, be better, worse, more empowered, less transparent over the time they have spent at that organisation. 

Career trajectory authenticity

Their experience too will undoubtedly be influenced by their relative progress through the organisation. If they have been promoted, invested in, developed and nurtured, then that is their authenticity. That success will inevitably influence the way they feel about their employer. Someone within the same business of similar ability, drive and desire, who has not had such positive experiences, may not have the same perceptions of opportunity within their organisation. Their authenticity will differ from that of their more successful colleague. 

It’s a contextual, subjective and personal authenticity. It’s not an absolute authenticity, but one framed by experience and experiences. 

Experiential authenticity

Experienced employees’ sense of authenticity is influenced as well by how they have adapted and developed within their work. We learn through experience, through our colleagues, through our mistakes – what once seemed bureaucratic, impenetrable, impossible, through time, guidance and work-arounds, becomes doable. So, the authentic experience of that worker is now a positive one – they’ve mastered a clunky system or some challenging inter-department relationships or a dearth of communications. 

Their working reality, their authenticity, if you like, is something they now largely take for granted. They’ve turned a negative into a positive. So, when we ask them about such systems and communications during EVP focus groups, their response is positive and authentically so – in terms of their own contextual authenticity. Not so the new joiner, with none of that context, who may well be encountering a minefield of frustration and friction – in complete contrast to the promises of the EVP that attracted them. 

I wonder too if the market doesn’t influence our perceptions of authenticity. The employment experience when the going is good, when the economy is booming, when your organisation is thriving is somewhat different to the labour market we’ve seen and encountered over the last three years. It can be all too easy for experienced employees to take a rose-tinted, nostalgic view of where their organisation has been, rather than where it is right now. 

So, if we view the authentic and the inauthentic in binary terms, we risk experienced employees distorting the reality of a new joiners’ experience through the context of their time with a business, their relative success, the changes they see about them and a see-sawing economy. 

Potential solutions

Two solutions, then, in terms of how we go about unearthing an organisation’s real, yes authentic, employment experience. We need to skew our employee conversations more towards those people who have joined more recently, within the last year. The sort of people who will still remember the working culture of their previous organisation and their first impressions of joining a new employer – making their own mind up about authenticity. Shift the balance of who your EVP discovery conversations are engaging with and focus on those with less experience.

We should absolutely still spend time listening to an employer’s more experienced people. But the questions we ask of them should be weighted more towards organisational change and direction over absolutes. And the examples we try to extract from such sessions need to focus on that sense of change and the identification of concrete and topical examples and stories – authentic stories…

Contextual authenticity

As a community, we toss about this word, without necessarily thinking about context, about how work-based authenticity is created and what it is based on. And how authenticity varies depending on the lens through which we are observing it. 

Certainly, tenure will have an influence on lived authenticity, and I suspect that an employee’s race, neuro diversity, gender, sexuality and socio-economic status will also influence relative working authenticity. 

Finally, if we’re going to be more nuanced about what authenticity means and how it might vary according, particularly, to tenure, are we into Target Value Proposition territory? Having a different message for the experienced within the organisation, compared to those new to your business? I hope that won’t be necessary, I can see the theoretical value of TVPs, but also the danger of diluting and confusing the impact of your message through their use. 

By all means, let’s still use the word, but authenticity isn’t constant, isn’t absolute, isn’t set in stone. Don’t apply one person’s apparent authenticity onto the experiences of others.