Evolving Your Employee Value Proposition

Building a resilient workforce

Written by Jodi Walters, this article first appeared in HRD Asia on 7 Dec 2022

According to Aon’s 2022 Salary Increase and Turnover survey, 75% of Asia-Pacific organisations have adjusted their total rewards offerings to address mounting talent challenges. So, how can HR leaders be sure their focus is on the right initiatives?

“In the Asia Pacific region, the focus has been on pay for quite some time now,” said Rahul Chawla, partner and head of human capital solutions, SEA at Aon. “However, with high inflation, there is only so much a company can spend on salaries, and with rising competition for skilled talent, it’s time HR teams started leveraging all the data that is available to them and using it to inform decisions about their employee value proposition (EVP).”

The Great Convergence

It’s clear that the relationship between employee and employer has changed significantly over the last couple of years but what is driving that change?

Chawla explains that four significant factors of convergence have happened to the global workforce recently; the need for organisations to think innovatively has caused a rise in digital convergence, skill convergence has happened as new skills apply across industries and role types and work and home are now blended for many employees, causing social convergence and, finally, stakeholder convergence requires the need to balance the expectations of shareholders, customers, government and societal needs.

As the world becomes increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, Chawla predicts constantly evolving change and said organisations will need to focus on building agile and resilient workforces. “I think agility and resilience should be front and centre as we build workforces and assess people to deliver goals. Employees need resilience to deal with unforeseen change and unpredictable events and they need agility to embrace those changes and bounce back.”

Is HR Treating The EVP As A PR Exercise?

Chawla believes HR needs to start living up to the adage that people are an organisation’s greatest asset and start looking into how they are treating their workforce versus how they are building a proposition to attract more human capital from an external standpoint.

“If we’re really critical about it, given the rush in a hot talent market, the EVP was also a rush job to drive talent acquisition and we need to start looking at the EVP as more than just a PR exercise,” said Chawla, explaining the cognitive dissonance that occurs for an employee if what they’re promised in a good-looking communications package doesn’t align with what they experience within the organisation.

For organisations to develop resilience, Chawla believes the traditional HR model needs to change. “It’s working, it’s not broken but it needs to constantly evolve. HR too needs to be agile,” said Chawla. “As HR organisations mature, they need to rethink how they deliver projects across functional areas to deliver a more resilient workforce.”