What is EVP and Why is it so Important in 2025?
10 December 2024
Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) has always mattered, but with a tight labour market and increasing budget pressure, your EVP is more important than ever. Using insights shared by Pluxee UK’s CEO – Burcin Ressamoglu – during a 2023 CIPD keynote, we’ll answer all your questions about EVP and explain why it’s such an essential part of your people and business strategy as we head into 2025.
Summary:
The Importance of EVP: Alleviating Rising Business Costs
The Importance of EVP: Navigating A Tight Labour Market
What’s the Difference Between EVP and Employer Brand?
How to Measure Employee Value Proposition
The Importance of an Employment Value Proposition for Recruiting and Retaining Talent
Why EVP is Important for Employee Engagement
Exploring the Five Pillars of EVP
Create an EVP that Supports Sustainable Growth with Pluxee UK
What is EVP?
In the most basic terms, EVP, short for Employee Value Proposition, is what you can offer your employees beyond their monthly salary. Your EVP is what sets you apart from other employers, what you offer employees in exchange for their time, skills and loyalty. More than monetary rewards, your EVP includes everything else you have to offer your people, including career development opportunities, work-life balance and culture.
Why is EVP Important?
Your EVP is important for several reasons, which we’ll explore in more detail during this blog. What’s essential to remember is that your employees’ experience with your EVP begins before they even join your business. Job hunters aren’t just looking at the salary advertised for a role but the extra benefits on offer that form part of your EVP.
The Importance of EVP: Alleviating Rising Business Costs
The 2025 National Minimum Wage and employer NIC increases will put pressure on business budgets. Experts predict that many organisations will issue a pay freeze, and the average national pay increase will be 3%, about 1.5% less than in previous years.
Your EVP can help you remain attractive to new and current employees, even if you cannot offer a pay rise. Employee benefits are part of your EVP. Financial wellbeing benefits can help employees save enough money to stretch their salaries further than a wage increase could - at a fraction of the cost to your business.
Explore our new Budget-Busting Employee Benefits Strategy Guide to discover our proven tips for using cost-saving benefits to fund growth.
The Importance of EVP: Navigating A Tight Labour Market
The UK has been in a tight labour market for the past few years, experiencing labour and skills shortages in many industries. A tight labour market isn’t great news for employers as they may find themselves in a talent bidding war. With the wage bill already increasing, it’s not possible for every business to offer an inflated salary.
Your EVP and all it comprises - development, culture, benefits - can help a business remain attractive to new talent, even if you’re not offering the highest annual salary.
What’s the Difference Between EVP and Employer Brand?
Your EVP is what you can offer employees beyond the salary, and this is predominantly visible once an employee expresses interest in your business. Your Employer Brand is always visible. It’s portrayed on your website and more regularly on your social media accounts. Every post shared paints a picture of your culture, work environment, values, and employee experience.
If you have CSR ambitions or a Social Value Pledge - share them. If you and your employees are involved in your community - post about it. It all adds up to create an image of your Employer Brand and your EVP. Use it to your advantage to paint a picture of a business that people will want to join.
How to Measure Employee Value Proposition
You may offer a mix of benefits, but you wonder if they’re hitting the mark. Is your EVP strong enough to support your business goals?
Here are a few ways you can measure your Employee Value Proposition:
- Quantitative Data: This includes the tangible things you can measure, such as engagement survey results, annual retention rates, and information on productivity.
- Qualitative Data: Gather data on employee needs and expectations - these can be through anonymous surveys to ensure honest feedback.
- Employer Brand: You can measure your employer brand perception by monitoring social media and looking at company reviews - including those given by employees on job sites.
- The Recruitment Process: How long does it take to fill a role? Explore your time-to-fill ratio and the quality of the people applying for roles with you.
- Recruitment KPIs: How much does it cost to hire a new employee, how healthy are your employee net promoter scores, and are you getting any employee referrals?
- Career Page Performance: Track and measure traffic to your career page to see if you’re attracting the talent you need.
Another metric to consider is your employee turnover rate. Dip into our blog, How to Calculate Employee Turnover, to discover how to calculate yours.
The Importance of an Employment Value Proposition for Recruiting and Retaining Talent
Attaining and attracting the skills your business needs is challenging, and 64% of employers consider the cost of recruiting fresh skills to be a considerable financial risk over the next two years.
As Burcin explained during her CIPD keynote, there’s been a 40% increase in unfilled vacancies over the past five years (Good Work Index), and 42% of employers are having difficulty filling vacancies, leading them to make more counter offers than ever before (Labour Market Outlook 2023).
Once you calculate your employee turnover and measure your time-to-fill ratio, you’ll have a clear view of whether you have an EVP that’s attractive and retaining. High employee turnover and a lengthy, expensive recruitment process are signs that your EVP isn’t hitting the mark and you’re losing talent to employers offering a more attractive package.
Why EVP is Important for Employee Engagement
Engagement levels are another metric to measure, but why would your EVP positively or negatively impact employee engagement?
We’ve covered what EVP is - what you offer your employees above and beyond the monthly salary. Your employee wellbeing initiatives form part of your EVP, and as we cover in our blog, The Evolution and Growing Importance of Employee Wellbeing, employees perform better and are more engaged when their employer prioritises their wellbeing.
When you create an environment where your employees can be their authentic selves, your business isn’t just a place to work; it becomes somewhere they feel they can belong, creating a sense of loyalty, pride in their work and a shared passion for seeing your business thrive.
Why Does Employee Engagement Matter? As we explore in our blog, Re-engaging the Disengaged Employee, businesses with a highly engaged workforce benefit from 21% greater profitability and 59% less employee turnover.
Engaged employees = higher employee motivation and retention!
Exploring the Five Pillars of EVP
Career Development
In our blog, Retain Top Talent with our Seven Employee Retention Tips, we share how 87% of millennials prioritise development and career progression opportunities, and 89% believe it’s important to constantly learn on the job.
When you open up a world of learning opportunities to your employees, they’ll embrace it. Whether for promotion or the chance to learn new skills, your employees crave the sense of achievement that comes from learning and growing with your business.
Your learning and development strategy is essential to your EVP, showing your employees that you’re investing in them and see them playing a part in the future of your business. Committing to your employees this way boosts trust, confidence, loyalty, and engagement.
Pluxee's brand reflects our commitment to redefining the future of the employee experience by amplifying joyful moments and creating opportunities." Burcin Ressamoglu
Work-Life Balance
The combination of the pandemic and younger generations joining the workforce has led to a work-life balance becoming an EVP must-have. Employees are demanding flexibility, the right to switch off outside of working hours is now regulated, and hybrid working environments are becoming the norm.
In our blog, Work-life Balance: Supporting Working Parents, we explore how you can support the needs of working parents, but the principles around flexibility apply to all employees.
Our current EVP at Pluxee represents the promise of what we offer our people, both those already with us and those considering their next career move.” Burcin Ressamoglu
Company culture
“It is important to be inclusive in your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives; you can do this by planning ahead to acknowledge a range of awareness days and faith celebration days that reflect your employees’ interests to ensure maximum engagement.” Claire Coleman, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead, Pluxee UK
70% of diverse organisations are more likely to report capturing a new market. It’s essential to constantly evolve your HR processes to meet the changing needs of your people and business. Flexibility and hybrid working, for example, have become hygiene factors - a must-have.
Discover how to Transform Your Workplace Culture: A Practical Guide to Change.
Purpose and Mission
At Pluxee, three guiding principles govern our actions and behaviours.
- The beating heart of our communities.
- Moving the world of work forward.
- Passionate about Employee Experience.
These three principles define how we act within our community - towards our partners, employees, clients, and consumers. We’re committed to practising what we preach in the employee engagement and benefits industry, and we have strong CSR ambitions backed up by a robust plan.
We explore why strong sustainability goals matter and the steps we’ve taken to achieve ours in our blog, Sustainability at the heart of everything… eco-friendly employee benefits.
Compensation
Embracing brand values within your EVP is essential. What you offer your employees must reflect your brand identity. For Pluxee UK, that means creating opportunities for our colleagues to enjoy more of what matters. We want our colleagues to have more moments of joy and experience what matters to them most. One vital way of achieving this is through a wide range of employee benefits that enhance their financial, mental, and physical wellbeing.
Financial Wellbeing
The cost of living remains high, and our Employee Discounts Platform and cashback-earning Pluxee Card help stretch employees’ salaries further. When used as part of your employees’ everyday lives, they can even have a more financial impact than a pay rise - something to consider with the pending NIC increases.
Mental Wellbeing
Mental ill health is one of the biggest causes of long-term sickness absence, so any investment you make in enhancing employee mental health will yield a return. Read our blog, ‘Why are EAPs beneficial to employees?’ to discover why an Employee Assistance Programme is such an essential part of your EVP.
Physical Wellbeing
From Discounted Gym Memberships and Cycle to Work Schemes to Online GP -our digital healthcare platform- keeping employees healthier for longer is great for your business - especially as the workforce is ageing. Having multiple and inclusive physical health benefits as part of your EVP is essential for attracting and retaining talent while reducing absenteeism.
Create an EVP that Supports Sustainable Growth with Pluxee UK
Employee benefits are an investment in your people but can be cost-effective and cost-neutral. In our blog, Salary Sacrifice and Your Business Cost-Savings Strategy, we explore how you can use benefits to fund an EVP that will help your business become an employer of choice.
Together, let’s open up a world of opportunities to help people enjoy more what really matters in their lives, at home, work and beyond.
Sources: Good Work Index, Labour Market Outlook 2023
