leadership

Statistics from the likes of Gartner and Gallagher over the last month have pointed to EVP’s failure to embrace and engage internal audiences. Which is, to say the least, something of a missed opportunity – your EVP will be of relevance to a modest (but clearly important) percentage of external candidate audiences. 

It should, however, strike a chord with 100% of your existing people.

But that’s not the way things appear to be playing out.

Let’s take another hugely credible source – AON’s 2026 Capital Trends Study. Lots of interesting and actionable insights to be found, but one in particular caught my eye. A creditable 37% of UAE employees have an EVP which is well defined and clearly understood across the organisation. Bringing up the rear, however, is the UK, with a woeful 11%. 

For very nearly 90% of UK employees, EVP is neither understood nor, indeed, noticed. 

Were AON’s conclusions a lonely outlier, then there could be an argument for shrugging off the findings. Given this is the third such recent reading from three separate and comprehensive pieces of research, then an inconvenient truth emerges. 

We need to rethink how we’re both constructing and communicating EVPs to employee audiences. 

I think I covered the reasons why this is important in my previous blog, and feel very free to take a look – https://employerbrandingadvantage.co.uk/2026/06/09/are-recent-hires-joining-a-different-organisation-to-the-one-existing-employees-work-in/).

But, briefly, if new joiners enter a business based on a particular promise or proposition, only to find very little trace of such a notion within their new employer, there is immediately a divide between recent hires and your core employee base.

So, what might be done to enhance EVP’s internal presence and contribution? 

I’m drawn to another finding from the AON study. For UK organisations, the top communication barrier is cited as a combination of information overload and competing priorities. Employee audiences are regularly bombarded with a bewildering range of internal voices – from senior leadership mission and vision messaging, general internal communications and EVP. That’s a lot to take in, particularly if those messages are not as aligned as they might be. 

It’s a point made, too, by the Harvard Business Review, which suggests that 57% of employees say they often receive duplicative communications, and 33% suggest messages are inconsistent or conflicting.

We might, too, forgive such audiences for prioritising C-suite voices over an EVP. 

Right now, you’re asking internal communities, with a lot already on their plate, to mentally toggle between different sets of messages and communications.

But what if those messages weren’t so different?

What if there was a clear and tangible sense of messaging alignment between what the business is seeking to achieve and how great talent wants to contribute to that achievement?

Heresy, I know, but what if EVP didn’t originate in either HR or Talent Acquisition? What if its essence came straight from either leadership or corporate communications, the people articulating organisational direction and strategy? 

In addition to reducing duplication and confusion, such an initiative should elevate the construct of everyone across an organisation having an influence on where that business is going and at what pace. 

If your EVP has no reference to or relationship with organisational direction and mission, it is occupying a bubble. There is no clear link between what the organisation is seeking to achieve and what is driving and motivating the people joining the business. 

An EVP should be about reflecting corporate intention through the lens of employee motivations. By making the most of the, for example, empowerment we provide, you’ll help drive our business forward. Perhaps we’ve been placing employee motivations in front of organisational direction and wondering why such messaging doesn’t land or clashes with what leadership is saying? 

Put the construction of EVP in the hands of the people already articulating where the business is going, and the give and the get stop being negotiated separately. Because, after all, a proposition is a two-way street, a give in return for a get. 

Let’s look at a real world example of this.

HubSpot offers a useful idea of what this looks like in practice, as articulated by Katie Burke, the organisation’s former Chief People Officer. She has been brutally candid that culture only earns its corn when it’s tangibly tied to strategy and the business model, rather than existing as a freestanding list of values nobody could disagree with – back to our bubble, if you like.

One of HubSpot’s own cultural tenets, for example — working towards the customer’s long-term success, not just their immediate happiness — is, according to Burke, a direct expression of the company’s commercial strategy, not a parallel HR initiative running alongside it. 

Clearly, this is something very specific and germane to one particular organisation – not a generic playbook to be copied and pasted. However, the learnings from HubSpot are clear: when corporate strategy and EVP (in that order) are constructed and communicated as one cohesive story rather than two, there’s absolute clarity between the give and the get. Absolute alignment about what the employee is receiving and how they should be applying it. 

The argument as to who owns EVP has been in existence for as long as our industry. 

Let’s return to the apparent heresy. To an extent, it doesn’t matter who owns or delivers those messages, but its construction needs to take place at source. Where the organisation makes its key decisions. The further from that source your EVP is, the more likely its impact is to be diluted. EVP and corporate direction need to be in lockstep – any misalignment risks the disengagement and frustration of employee audiences.