I have spent a large part of my career helping organizations understand why people choose to work for them.
When I started doing this work, we didn’t talk about Employer Value Propositions. We talked about labor market communications. The problem was fairly straightforward: organizations had jobs and needed people to fill them.
By 2005, my work was already changing. We started doing research into what people actually valued about working for an organization and what differentiated one employer from another. We didn’t call it an EVP at the time, but that is essentially what we were looking for.
The EVP changed employer branding fundamentally. Instead of deciding what we wanted to say and then finding a way to say it well, we started with the organization. We talked to employees and leaders. We looked for patterns in why people joined, why they stayed and what they valued. From there we built an employer promise that was distinctive, relevant and, true.
After doing it for a long time, I have become increasingly interested in something we tend to encounter along the way. People may tell you that they value the autonomy they have and then describe how difficult it has become to make a decision. Leaders may talk about collaboration while employees explain how functions increasingly protect their own interests. An organization may pride itself on being entrepreneurial while people who have been there for ten years tell you it has become more cautious as it has grown.
For an EVP, these are tensions to work through. You need to understand what is sufficiently true to become part of the promise and where the evidence isn’t strong enough.
Take autonomy. Suppose it has always been an important part of working for your company. As the organization grows, more governance is introduced. Decisions involve more stakeholders. Managers become more careful about taking risks. Issues that used to be resolved locally start travelling upwards. At some point employees begin to experience less autonomy. You can change the employer promise. Perhaps autonomy is no longer something the organization should emphasize. But nothing about the organization itself has changed because you took a word out of the EVP.
This is where the question becomes more interesting to me. Employee experience is often treated as something an organization can shape directly. We design journeys, improve communication, train managers, define values and create initiatives around the moments that matter. All of those things can be useful. But people also experience the organization through hundreds of much less designed moments.
Who can make a decision without asking permission. What happens when someone gets something wrong. Whether helping another team comes at the expense of your own targets. Which information you have access to. What your manager does when results are under pressure. Whether a senior leader follows the process or simply goes around it.
None of these things were designed as an employee experience. Together, they produce one.
This is the part of culture that I think organizations often underestimate. We tend to describe culture through what people experience. The organization is entrepreneurial, collaborative, demanding, caring, political or bureaucratic. Those descriptions can be accurate, but they are still descriptions of an outcome.
The more useful question is what keeps producing that outcome.
When decisions continually travel upwards, employees will describe the organization as bureaucratic. When teams are rewarded for their own results, collaboration becomes harder regardless of how often collaboration appears in the values. When taking a risk has asymmetric consequences, people become more cautious. When leaders make exceptions under pressure, people learn that the formal rules are not really the rules.
None of this requires people to resist the culture an organization wants. Often they are behaving rationally within the organization they actually work in. That distinction matters well beyond employer branding. Organizations spend considerable time defining the culture they need for their strategy. More entrepreneurial. More accountable. More collaborative. Faster. Customer focused.
The intention can be perfectly clear while everyday behavior continues to point somewhere else. We often respond to that gap by working on the people. More communication, leadership development, engagement, values activation or change initiatives. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Sometimes we are asking people to behave differently while leaving the conditions that shaped the old behavior largely intact. An organization can ask for more ownership while decisions still need to climb the hierarchy. It can ask functions to collaborate while performance is measured locally. It can ask people to experiment while the downside of failure sits with the individual who took the risk.
In those situations, the gap between the intended culture and the experienced culture is not mainly a communication problem.
It is telling us something about how the organization works. It also changes how I look back at the EVP work I have done over the years. Employer brand research gives you an unusual view into an organization. You hear leadership ambition and employee reality almost side by side. Sometimes the gap between them tells you that the employer story needs work.
For years, authenticity has been one of the most useful principles in employer branding. Don’t promise something that isn’t true. Find the evidence. Make sure employees recognize the organization you are presenting to the outside world.
I still agree with all of that.
But there is a limit to authenticity as an answer. If the experience is moving away from what the organization wants to be, making the promise more accurately reflect the current reality does not solve very much.
At some point the more useful question is not whether the promise is true. It is why the organization keeps producing the experience it does.
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