Our latest guide and whitepaper explore the concept of the Employer Value Proposition and its increasing importance for businesses who are looking to remain relevant in today’s fiercely competitive jobs market. We’ve also taken a deep dive into the practical steps organisations should take when looking to transform and redefine their own EVP.
One of our biggest takeaways from these guides was the increasing importance of new technology and systems in helping business get to grips with identifying their core strengths as a brand and to help them gather the metrics and data they need in order to enact meaningful change.
As important as it is to be positioning your organisation strongly within the job market, it’s also crucial that organisations look towards their existing people and to consider how strengthening their EVP can help them retain the skills and services of key talent.
Time and attendance is much more than just the process of quantifying the hours worked or absences taken by your people- it is a measure of your overall structure and makeup of your organisation- essentially, how you work.
Recent years have served to drive conversations around working structures, with people across all industries having to come to terms with a very different way of working. As we move towards the future, a return to rigid structures seems to be less and less desirable for many.
What is the EVP?
The Employee Value Proposition, or EVP, describes the various metrics which contribute to your brand as an employer. A well-defined EVP highlights your key strengths as a place to work and defines the specific qualities which distinguish you from your competitors when it comes to recruitment and keeping your best people. When looking at bringing on board new talent into your organisation, the EVP is designed to sell your business to prospective new hires and tell them specifically why they should choose to work for you and what they seek to gain from it.
A strong, well embedded EVP also goes a long way towards strengthening levels of employee retention and engagement as values which are championed for the recruitment cycle inevitably find a lot of crossover when it comes to retaining the skillsets of key employees. Research by The HR Director has noted the increasing trend for people to expect their employers to act as more inspirational and ethical forces within their respective markets, particularly when it comes to their engagement with diversity and inclusion initiatives as well as broader issues such as environmental concerns. An effective EVP offers a robust framework wherein companies are able to demonstrate their commitment to these issues and how their brand aligns culturally with these shifts.
What is the importance of the EVP for Time and Attendance?
Time and attendance and the overall working structure has been a dominant theme across all industries since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the adoption of widespread home working as an emergency expedience during the earliest days of the crisis, many businesses found themselves having to fundamentally rework their structure.
The flexibility afforded by this widespread adoption of home working has given employees an unprecedented opportunity to re-evaluate how they work- in many cases, coming to the conclusion that productivity being linked to the office is something of a myth.
The challenge for organisations has been trying to strike a balance between a return to normality and also taking into account this heightened desire for flexibility. Research by Aviva has shown a greater emphasis on work-life balance as a priority for employees.
Businesses who fail to take into account these shifting priorities will find themselves struggling to retain the services of key talent. Recent research indicates that 38% of UK employees are considering quitting their current jobs. This represents a significant sea change for employers as it suggests that even as they place their focus on recovery plans, they are at risk of losing out on the talent they need to drive their success. This phenomenon has been dubbed “The Great Resignation” and demonstrates perfectly the disconnect between organisational wants and the needs of their people.
Businesses which are able to demonstrate a commitment to less rigid ways of working will not only find themselves more effectively placed to retain the services of key talent- they also position themselves as more dominant forces in the recruitment space. As more and more people leave their current positions due to perceived rigidity within their organisations, it makes sense that they will be seeking out employers who share their values and demonstrate a commitment to flexible working. Your Time and Attendance policies can be the make or break factor which determines how candidates view you as a potential employer.
How Advanced Time and Attendance can help.
Identifying the need for a time and attendance system is actually deceptively simple. If you’re tired of losing hours to inefficient processes, find yourself constantly chasing anomalies in start times or correcting double booked annual leave, then time and attendance solutions are here to support you.
With regards to your EVP, Advanced Time and Attendance offers a framework whereby businesses can offer the flexibility and hybrid working models that today’s workers are clamouring for- placing an emphasis on a greater work-life balance and allowing employees to take greater ownership of their schedules.
Effective Time and attendance solutions work in lockstep with businesses to specifically help them tackle some of the concerns that may come alongside a largely remote set up. Visibility of employees and their output is important but so is the ability to engender trust in your people and to demonstrate your confidence in them to achieve your goals.
We’ve designed Advanced Time and Attendance to help tackle the specific challenges which arise from managing a hybrid workforce and to help you find new avenues and opportunities to empower your people and transform the way you work:
- Self service functionality which allows your people to take charge of their schedules, their absence requests and clocking. Comprehensive time and attendance solutions allow your people to clock in remotely from a tablet or mobile device, meaning they stay connected with the heart of the business wherever they are working from.
- Engender trust in your people by allowing them to take charge of managing their schedule. With visibility of hours worked, you have the freedom to allow employees to craft their own set up.
- Keep your people connected with the organisation via a comprehensive employee portal. Give your employees access to a one stop shop for all their time and attendance needs. Allow them to clock in and out, make absence requests and view holiday allowances and payslips, all on an easy to use platform.
By allowing your people visibility of their schedules you empower them to take ownership of their working week and also free them to craft a working pattern which works around their needs. This ensures a sense of continuity as well as a universal employee experience for your people, regardless of where they choose to work from. Most importantly, flexibility in working patterns offers greater opportunity for improvements to the work life balance as domestic responsibilities such as doctors visits no longer have to be taken into account alongside a rigid working structure.
With so many employees making an exit from their current workplaces, it is vitally important that your EVP is placing the work-life balance at the heart of what you do. This is a major priority for the modern workforce and one which prospective new hires will be assessing your company on the basis of.
What’s next?
At Advanced, we believe in the power of technology to help you achieve more. We understand that the future success of your business will be largely entwined with your EVP and your perception as a brand, which is why our Advanced Time and Attendance solution has been designed specifically to give you the oversight you need to not understand the challenges facing your people but to also understand what may be holding you back from a people management and recruitment standpoint and to help you craft policy and procedure to overcome any challenges.
We understand that defining and strengthening your EVP may seem like a daunting prospect but we also truly believe that it is a worthwhile undertaking that can help you gain a greater understanding of your business and your strengths and weaknesses. We believe in walking the walk too, which is why we have focused on our own EVP and undertaken the journey of getting to the core of what that means to us at Advanced. We’d like to take those lessons we learned from that experience and help you with your own EVP transformation.
We believe in the power of the EVP to help transform the perception of your business and to position your organisation as an influential and inspirational place to work. It’s clear that today’s workforce is clamouring for an evolution in working structure and a move away from rigid processes. The systems and technology which you rely upon daily should be ideally placed to help you transform your business to meet the shifting needs of your employees and prospective new hires and to position your organisation as an influential and forward thinking entity.
If you’d like to learn more about the EVP, what it means to your business or how we can help you strengthen and define it within your organisation, come and explore our suite of People Management solutions and get in touch today.