You worked hard to define your candidate persona and develop your EVP. Now it’s time to turn your value propositions into a genuine employee experience. To take the promised experience beyond a slogan, you need to apply it to all touch points. If you set out with a slogan or tagline like “You are the future!” or “Come and make a difference!”, then your employees should experience that they are the future, or they have a way of knowing how to show their difference in your company.
On account of the fact that implementation is difficult, most employer brand projects will likely get shelved at this stage. Well, before you ask why, there are several reasons for it:
Executive buy-in. If you fail to explain (sell) the benefits of EB to your top management; they won’t own the project.
You don’t know where to start implementing. Employees first… Instead, you started with the candidates. And since you failed to explain what was in it for them, you couldn’t get the support of the employees.
Other departments think EB will increase their workload and avoid helping you. As you know, when you start a project, you make a presentation to top management team to show them how it will help with their business strategy, or how you will align with business outcomes and show them the functional benefits. If you haven’t done it before you launch the project, do it now to get their support.
How to overcome these hurdles, you may ask…
Start with project launch meetings. Organise these meetings separately in each department with the participation of top management. These will be sincere meetings where people can easily ask questions and leave by really understanding what’s going on.
The first problem you will face is to convince and change people. You should explain AND convince your employees why this project is carried out, what results are expected, and the benefits for them. This change will not be possible without them.
The first advisable action is to do something that would have a big positive impact on or bring positive change to all or most of your employees. Let everyone feel, believe and embrace the first steps of change.
Whilst designing your actions according to your list of priorities, sometimes it will be enough to simply change the name of a practise, or sometimes you will have to kill an existing practice and design a new one from scratch. For example, changing the name of an “assessment centre” that causes a reaction into “development centre” can solve the problem without changing the essence of the job. Because people do not like to be assessed, but most of us like to develop ourselves.
Include employees as much as possible in process, procedure and practise o designs. You may not see the details of daily lives of employees. Let your employees design the things that will affect their lives and have a say with their decisions.
To deliver what you promised with your EVP, during implementation, you should go through all the touch points and restructure according to your new EVP so that the employees and candidates experience it.