I’ve had a couple of conversations about employees, benefits, and how learning sits as part of the ‘what makes people want to work here’ conversation.

First up, I posted a couple of week’s ago following a question from Nick Court about Employee Value Proposition (EVP). In that post I suggested EVP should be a sum of the benefits the organisation provides. At present, EVP feels like advertising – a bright poster telling prospective employees what we can do for you. What we don’t reveal are the terms and conditions, hurdles, and the reasons why we can’t follow through with those benefits.

For example, you’ll see phrases like this in job adverts:

Fantastic development opportunities to learn and progress

Job vacancy recovered 19th July 2023

A few thoughts:

• My understanding (and expectations) of fantastic might be very different to yours
• Development might mean skills I want to improve which don’t have a direct work impact
• I’d want to know how much of the opportunities are funded
• Learn is a really wide description and would want process, personal, and people skills as part of that offer
• If you’re promising progression I WILL ask into what type of role and over what duration

Almost certainly written by a recruitment function, how far were the learning, benefits, HR, and OD functions engaged in the discussion about this?

I was very lucky to spend some time with Martin Couzins yesterday and he mentioned he’d posted a link to an article from MITSloan which also highlights the siloed nature of the HR and people functions, especially as part of the benefits conversation.

Again, the need to work collaboratively is highlighted with benefits AND learning working together to craft more relevant and appropriate support for employees. If you look at the EVP which is attracting new employees, are you following through on that promise for your existing employees. It’s not a surprise that between 10 and 25 per cent of new employees leave within the first six months of starting a new job. Why? They don’t see the promises which were made being realised.

And you thought it was tough before? People want flexibility in their work now – flexibility in location, work time, and job design. That means people will expect flexibility in the development they get now – flexibility in channel/mode, flexibility in duration/time/money spent, flexibility in choice and freedom to work outside the lines which have always constrained them.

Talk about benefits all you want but make sure they really are benefits, and not statements with the toughness of tissue paper.