leadership

Does the failure of EVP to take root internally create an immediate dissonance between new joiners and existing employees?

Last time around, I shared a statistic from Gartner which suggested “just 16% of employees report knowing what makes up their organisation’s EVP”. 

If that wasn’t sufficiently alarming, then further digging has produced the following gem from this year’s Arthur Gallagher Workforce Trends Report – “Only 15% of employers have an active, socialised EVP and 37% don’t have one at all”.

For perhaps 15 years, the industry has been extolling the virtues of interpolating (the opposite of extrapolating, or so I’m told) an externally focused EVP back towards internal employee audiences. And why not? It makes perfect sense that the reason people join your organisation correlates to the reason they should stay and remain motivated by the corporate challenges ahead. 

It may well make perfect sense, but the two statistics, from differing but highly credible sources, suggest this simply isn’t happening. Or happening with any apparent degree of success. 

Let’s analyse some of the implications of new joiners being far more aware of your EVP than the people they are about to join as colleagues. 

What about the relationship between a new joiner and their line manager? Assuming said line manager is working for an organisation within the 85% who do not have an active, socialised EVP, is there an immediate disconnect? The new joiner has arrived in part because of the EVP’s implicit promise – if this is a promise their line manager is simply unaware of, then they would be hard pressed to help keep it. 

A new employee wants to feel as though they belong as soon as possible. That they are on the same page and wavelength as their colleagues. But if one of their key motivations – the EVP – is something only they recognise, then they have less in common with the people around them than is ideal. Is the inevitable conclusion that new joiners and the existing workforce feel as though they are working for different organisations?

Similarly, such a disparity is hardly conducive to trust and engagement. If one of the central drivers for me moving employers appears no longer to exist once I’ve walked through your doors, what is my likely response? Again, the EVP is a promise – but if there is precious little evidence of such a promise within a new workplace, there exists little need or motivation for it to be kept. 

It’s highly likely that a new joiner will have been exposed to EVP-inspired employee stories during their recruitment journey – through employer branding messages and careers sites. If those stories simply do not exist internally, when that individual joins the business, how does that reinforce the view that they have made the right career decision? If I’m three months into my career with an organisation, but my last experience with the EVP was on your career pages, how genuine does that proposition feel right now?

How should existing employees feel about such dissonance? If new people are joining an organisation bursting with positivity as a result of the promise that has brought them into the business – perhaps a promise that is not being communicated to longer serving employees, what conclusions should existing people arrive at? That they are not as valued as new joiners? That their continued employment is being rather taken for granted? That their employer no longer has to work so hard in return for both their engagement and their presence?

Although the word is losing currency through both overuse and misuse, authenticity is an issue here. Candidates and new joiners have to implicitly believe that the essence of the employer branding messages they are being served is genuine. What is, then, the impact of entering a business only to find that their central job changing driver is absent within their new workplace? That working reality is somewhat different to the initial promise?

If the why I joined an organisation is not evident within that business, it feels as if there’s less reason as to why I should stay. 

Two examples are illustrative of organisations who have and have not successfully socialised their EVP internally as well as externally.

Everything Amazon does, operationally as well as from a resourcing perspective, is predicated around its 16 leadership principles. Strategy, decision making and the interview process itself are structured around these principles. They are part of the internal culture, expectations and lexicon. They are not a surprise to new joiners, because they have come across them on the recruitment journey – and they do anything but disappear when that candidate becomes an employee. 

At the other end of the spectrum is WeWork, the hybrid workspace provider, until their demise which culminated in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, after being valued at $47bn in 2019. Before its fall from grace, the organisation framed its career offering around ‘doing what you love’ and about joining a movement more than taking a job. Internally, however, reality was somewhat different, characterised as it was by a culture of fear, particularly as regards its CEO. Dissent and disagreement were firmly discouraged and full financial transparency was anything but. 

For one organisation, people joining knew exactly what they were getting into and joined teams using common terms, vocabulary and behaviours. We can only imagine the jolt new joiners felt on walking through the doors of the second organisation. One organisation made $181bn in this year’s first quarter, the other was valued in 2023 at $47m (from $47bn four years previously). 

There will be challenges, there are likely to be turf issues with internal communications real estate, but the longer an EVP remains outside looking in, the more likely it will be viewed as lacking relevance, import and heft. The more it is adopted as a cultural and behavioural guide and litmus test, the less dissonance between new joiner expectations and existing workforce reality there will be. 

That’s why the 15% of organisations that do promote and publicise their EVP amongst internal audiences are creating togetherness, belonging and unity of purpose. 

They are one organisation, not one for joiners and something else entirely for existing employees.