#19 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

🏆 What you do better than everyone else? EVP FTW

🧲 4 key decisions to make before implementing benefits

💥 Start-up career hacks with Nick Walker, COO (exclusive content)

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What you do better than everyone else? EVP FTW

Think EVP (Employee Value Proposition*) is just about cool perks like a cycle-to-work scheme, bringing pets to the office or having a ping pong table? Think again.

In essence, an EVP is the promise an employer makes to its future and current employees in exchange for their talent, skills, experience and contribution.

Much like your customer value proposition, EVP revolves around what employees gain by choosing to join your company (attraction) and what motivates them to stay with you (retention). Ultimately, it's about aligning your offerings with what they seek.

*I use ‘Employer’ and ‘Employee’ Value Proposition interchangeably 

Employees look for 2 things: hygiene and motivational factors at work

Let's dive into the psychology of work. Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory breaks down that which matters for employees into 2 parts: hygiene and motivational factors.

Hygiene factors include 5 things: (1) coworker relationships, (2) management quality, (3) security and work conditions, (4) compensation and benefits, and (5) policies and processes. If these factors are inadequate, they can lead to job dissatisfaction.

On the other hand, motivational factors include 6 things: (1)achievement, (2) recognition, (3) responsibility, (4) advancement, (5) personal growth, and (6) the work itself. These factors drive higher performance by fulfilling individuals' deep-seated needs for personal growth and self-actualisation.

According to Herzberg, both hygiene and motivational factors are equally important. Insufficient hygiene factors can lead to job dissatisfaction, while inadequate motivational factors impact performance. 

EVP is what you do better than others (and you can’t please everyone!)

When customers buy a product, some focus on price, some crave convenience, while some seek variety, and others are all about the “cool factor.” You can’t be everything to everyone, you only need to be everything to your ideal customers 😉.  So, your product's value proposition lies in excelling in a few (not all) key areas for your ideal customers.

Heads up: Before you craft your EVP, it’s important to know what your ideal candidates and employees value when choosing to join and stay with your company. Of course, both hygiene and motivational factors need to meet acceptable standards. Above and beyond acceptable, EVP is deciding which specific factors you as an employer excel in relative to your competitors. 

Let's take a look at what Netflix aims to excel in compared to others, as demonstrated in their EVP.

1. Encourage independent decision-making by employees ➡️ responsibility (motivational)

2. Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately ➡️ responsibility (motivational)

3. Be extraordinarily candid with each other ➡️ co-worker relationship  (hygiene) & responsibility (motivational)

4. Keep only our highly effective people ➡️ achievement (motivational) 

5. Avoid rules ➡️ policies & processes (hygiene) & responsibility (motivational)

Unsurprisingly, their EVP one-liner is ‘Seeking Excellence.’ 

In a nutshell, EVP is the promise you make to your future and current employees. It's not about fancy perks. Nor is it about pleasing everyone (because you can't). Ensuring acceptable standards for both hygiene and motivational factors is baseline; EVP  drills down on a few key areas you promise your future and current employees you will do better than other organisations. 

4 key decisions to make before implementing benefits

During my time at Schibsted P&T, we crafted our EVP to emphasise working with highly skilled colleagues to solve complex technical and customer-centric problems, coupled with competitive benefits, in order to attract top talent from major tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and others.

At that point in my career, I had never implemented benefits let alone designed them as part of an EVP strategy 😱😲🤯. Sitting in the basement of our tiny start-up office near Bond Street (you can't get more start-upy than that!) I met with Malcolm Lyons and Caroline Masterton from Parallel Employee Benefits - to help me design benefits as one of the key pillars of our EVP. That meeting remains vivid in my memory because it profoundly shaped my approach to benefits strategy.

First and foremost, we focus on aligning on a key decision: do you want to offer everyone the same benefits, or do you want to offer different benefits to different groups?

🪜 Blanket vs. differentiated strategy

For example, a differentiated benefit is where you might decide to give a more comprehensive private medical care coverage to VP level and above or allow for remote working for the Tech team. Even though in start-ups we often espouse the mantra of treating everyone the same, Let me be frank, we don’t - and it’s usually not on purpose. 

When we really, really want to hire that VP from Amazon, we make exceptions to customise their holidays. Or when we desperately want to recruit that Director from Google, we customise their private medical benefits to cover their family, a perk not extended to other Directors in the start-up. And what happens when their peers find out? They get upset with the inconsistency. What happens when the Finance team discovers this? It messes with their budget forecast, because they haven't factored in these anomalies. 

So, before you design your benefits, pick a strategy and stick to it - whether it’s to take a blanket approach or a differentiated one. If you don’t, you’ll end up making “decisions by exceptions” and that will undermine how much you can leverage your benefits strategy for long-term attraction, engagement and retention.

Next, we delve into our long-term strategy to grow, engage and retain our ideal candidates and employees once we’ve attracted them to join. And here are 3 things that Malcolm got me to consider:

🚀 Progressive benefits strategy (for growth)

If you opt for a differentiated approach, you can design your benefits to drive growth. For instance, if your company has 6 levels of career progression, you could offer tiered private medical insurance or pension coverage. Tier A benefits could apply to levels 1 and 2, Tier B to levels 3 and 4, and Tier C to levels 5 and 6. This tiered approach to benefits can foster career advancement and reward achievement as employees progress.

🪴 Longevity benefit strategy (for retention)

Additionally, with a differentiated approach, you can choose to incorporate a retention strategy. For example, in the UK, the legal minimum pension contribution is 8%, with the employer's minimum obligation set at 3%. As an employer, you can opt to increase your contribution based on the length of service. For instance, in the first year, your contribution could be 3%, increasing to 4% in the second year, and so on. Another common practice among many companies is to offer sabbaticals after employees have been with the company for 4 years.

🌟 Cost vs. value strategy (for engagement)

Benefits that hold value for your employees might not necessarily incur additional (or significant) costs for you. Understanding your employees and your business is essential to finding the sweet spot of high value and low cost. 

Here are 3 examples of benefits that are high value for employees, but minimal cost to the employer:

 Example 1️⃣Winter Hours: Employees can take an extra half an hour before or after your lunch break, once a week, for exercise; this could be a class, a run or to go to the gym. 

Rationale: Encouraging exercise during daylight hours boosts immunity, especially when the days are shorter and darker in the winter. 

Example 2️⃣: Christmas Period: The offices are closed on Christmas Eve & New Year’s Eve.

Rationale: For this employer, client contact decreases significantly during this period. By giving the employees these days off, they aim to increase morale and allow everyone more time to enjoy the holiday season with their loved ones. 

Example 3️⃣: Take two for you! Take up to two hours each month, to deal with life admin. 

Rationale: Providing time during work hours to handle personal admin tasks helps alleviate those nagging worries. When these tasks are sorted, it becomes easier for employees to stay focused on their work. 

When benefits form part of your EVP, it's crucial to think about how they contribute to the overall employee journey (not just during the attraction stage!). During planning, consider both the short-term costs for now and the long-term costs as employees increase. Also, when experimenting with benefits, it's crucial to differentiate between reversible and irreversible ones and to evaluate the potential impact if benefits need to be withdrawn. All of these help avoid surprises down the road.

Don’t believe everything you read: there’s no perfect solution

My passion is building capability, enabling individuals and companies to reach their goals through tools, frameworks, structure and culture. I thrive when businesses achieve their ambitions through transformation and change.

The mistake I made

When you join a start up for the first time, it’s so exciting. All the things you’ve read, stories you’ve heard, talks you’ve been too or people you know that tell you what it’s going to be like. 

I did all that and thought that because I’d read and heard so much, I knew what to expect and how to handle it from day 1 and started to make assumptions on what to do, when faced with some immediate challenges. I thought I could make change quickly, that’s what start-ups are about after all right? I spoke to many in my team and thought I heard the cry out for change and so I assumed that I could just start. 

I soon realised when I started to gather feedback after some initial changes. People felt that the culture was changing too fast and key team members weren’t happy because of what they thought they were losing. 

What I really needed to do was dig deeper, go slower with change and understand what the team really valued. Thinking everything I read was going to work since they were start-up stories was my big mistake and by taking steps to check my assumptions earlier helped make every change afterwards, much more successful.

The one thing I wish I knew to avoid that mistake

No start-up story is going to be the same. 

There is no pattern or case study that you can follow. Sounds obvious now, but it’s easy to fall into that trap because sometimes in bigger companies, that book you read might have a story that’s exactly what you are experiencing. They are different types of businesses though and start-ups don’t all follow the same pattern, that’s part of the fun! 

In those early days in a start-up, while you can be inspired by things you read or hear about, never assume it’ll be the same for you. Use those learnings as tools and inspiration, not to follow blindly.

One tip to hack your career in start-ups

Don’t believe everything you read. It’s common these days to read blogs or hear stories that are just like ‘playing house’ the perfect scenario, with the perfect solution - but they don’t necessarily help your situation.

Treat every start-up like it’s unique, a great opportunity to explore and try techniques and tactics that are bold, ambitious, but curious and with a quick feedback loop to help guide you on your path. 

There are plenty of your skills and experiences that you can leverage, but the great part about start-ups - no two will ever be the same! Being in that mindset from day 1, will help your career in start-ups immensely. 

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