What’s an EVP and how we created ours.
EVP = Employer Value Proposition. How EVP is communicated or defined can really vary from company to company. Some places dig deep into practical benefits provided for employees, such as your pension, holiday allowance, share options even free snacks & coffee. Others look at career progression opportunities or training budgets.
Why do you need one?
I suppose you don’t NEED one? But why wouldn’t you if it allows you to truly understand what makes the business an amazing place to work? Knowing this enables you to understand what is important to employees and allows you to continue to prioritise those things!
Hopefully this means we can continue to engage and retain our existing team as well as attract amazing talent!
What we did …
We had a hunch that if the team were asked “Why do you love working here?” they wouldn’t mention any of the practical benefits. To prove our theory this is what we did …
We asked current employees “Why do you love working at accuRx?” they were allowed just two sticky notes.
We asked candidates in our interview process “What stood out to you about accuRx and was a driver for your application?”
We dug into our employee engagement platform Peakon that anonymously surveys the team weekly and pulled out some key themes.
You might be able to see from the photo that after grouping everything the themes were:
- Team
- Impact
- Our Users
- Food
- Mission
- Variety & Transparency
Peakon told us the key drivers of engagement amongst the team were:
- Strategy
- Management Support
- Environment
- Freedom of opinions
A quote from a candidate:
“The things that made the biggest impression on me during the application process were:
User-first: Firm commitment to listening to users and solving their problems (for example, by going to surgeries, observing, talking and feeding back), rather than listening to engineers and solving what they think are the problems.
Trust: Allowing employees to manage their time and their deliverables, and teams to manage their goals, rather than having a top-down approach.”
I knew in true accuRx style the EVP would be something that would constantly be reviewed and iterated. This would ensure it was kept up to date as we grew. I decided to run a workshop with a few members of the team I knew would provide different and interesting points of view to get us working on the basics. By the end of the workshop I wanted us to have agreed on an EVP Statement and on the 3 main pillars that supported this.
There was some discussion around the best phrasing, should we use Walk the Walk or Genuinely? We agreed on Genuinely because not only was it more explicit, we felt whilst being a stand alone theme it was also an adverb for the other two.
We cheated a little in grouping some of the different themes together as it was too tricky to pick specific ones! This is what we came up with …
Our EVP Statement :
💙 Enjoy your work. Make healthcare better. Genuinely.
Enjoy your work:
Here at accuRx your colleagues are truly your friends. We are highly collaborative, supportive and encourage opinions and ideas from everyone.
We place a lot of emphasis on being a values fit and culture add in our recruitment process and progression frameworks, this is one of the ways we are able to maintain such a positive environment as we grow.
We want to nurture an environment where on Sunday evening, people are excited about the week ahead, because of the work they do and the people they work with.
Make healthcare better:
Our collective passion and support for the NHS is undeniable. We are incredibly grateful for everything they do to make our lives and our families lives better!
In return, we build products that positively impact the lives of millions.
We have a strong sense of purpose, to make people healthier and healthcare staff happier.
Genuinely:
It’s so easy to say these things but we really mean it. We genuinely enjoy our work and we are genuinely making healthcare better by building the software our users need, not the software we think they want.
We don’t just print our values out and stick them up on a wall. We live and breathe them and embed them into everything we do.
Our Employee NPS score in Peakon is 86!
59 above the technology benchmark making us in the top 5% of tech companies 🤩
(Peakon is our employee engagement platform. Each week we survey the team anonymously to understand how engaged they are.)
Now what …
We have created a notion page that shares all this content with the team, it’s also public so prospective candidates have access to it. Hopefully, this enables them to have a stronger sense of our culture 🤞🏽
We are thinking of creative ways of how we can continue to communicate these themes externally but also prioritise them internally.
For example — we have added quotes to all of our job descriptions from the team to really bring them to life!
This is just the start … keeping watching as we grow to see how our EVP evolves.
