Your employee value proposition (EVP) needs to evolve with a changing world

During volatile times, it is important to learn about the personal experiences of your employees. One of the best ways to do this effectively — particularly with remote employees — is to conduct online focus groups.

Powerful and unexpected insights come from asking open-ended questions, allowing employees to share their thoughts. And advanced qualitative methods, like natural language processing, should be used to develop rich descriptions of employee experiences.

In the absence of effective EVPs, employees become distracted, distressed, and start looking for other opportunities.

When evaluating the critical needs of your workforce, it is important to take a whole-person perspective, considering the wide range of life concerns that employees carry with them inside and outside work. We use a holistic needs assessment to help employees identify their most pressing concerns in four critical life domains, their:

• Work life,
• Personal life,
• Financial life, and
• Health and well-being.

Then, using various statistical techniques, we develop evidence-based insights about what employees need now, and in the future.

In an ideal world, organizations would meet the needs of every employee. But practically speaking, organizations must make tradeoffs and design rewards packages that are realistic and cost-effective. Conjoint research is one of the most effective ways to identify these tradeoffs.

When Mercer conducts a Conjoint study, we start by asking organizations to identify the specific EVP elements they are considering offering to their employees. We then take those elements and arrange them in a series of balanced design comparison sets, usually consisting of three or four elements. Research participants are then asked to select which element they value the most and the least.

The resulting analysis generates a rank-ordered score for each element, reflecting the value that employees place on each employee value proposition offering. If your organization is seeking clarity on how best to invest in your people, this is the information you need to make evidence-based choices.

One-size no longer fits all. More and more people want to tailor their own work experiences and establish idiosyncratic employment contracts, arrangements, or personalized deals with their employers. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, raising a range of challenges that vary based on employees’ career stage, their personal lives, and their future aspirations. As you redesign your EVP, it is critical to determine the extent to which employee experiences and preferences differ across employee populations.

We use a set of research techniques, including cluster analysis, profile analysis, and personas, to identify preference patterns and determine the extent to which EVP offerings need to flex to meet the needs of a particular workforce segment. Based on our research, we find that employees’ work-related needs and desires vary based on their:  

• Gender,
• Generation,
• Job level, and
• Caregiving status.