I see this pattern over and over again. An organisation starts developing an EVP, with good intentions and real investment. The research gets done, some themes emerge and get turned into pillars and a beautifully crafted framework emerges. It gets signed off at senior level, and then… not much changes.
The careers site might get a refresh, but the EVP doesn’t become the living, breathing thing it was supposed to be. Six months later, someone asks “what happened with the EVP?” and nobody has a good answer.
If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because of one (or more) of these five things (although there are others too!).
1. It was built using quantitative data only
The most common starting point: a small project team; often an agency plus an HR or TA lead, develops the EVP, validates it with a handful of senior stakeholders, and launches it. The employee voice in the room was from annual survey results, possibly even a pulse check. Quantitative data that tells you what people think against the specific questions you have asked, sprinkled with a fair dose of caution (will my boss know these answers came from me?). It gets processed into themes that feel ‘safe’ and defensible.
The organisations I’ve seen create effective EVPs are the ones who use quantitative and qualitative research. Yes, survey data is part of the picture but it is only part of it.
What is helpful from surveys is the tracking over time; getting a feel for where the tensions are and where the genuine satisfaction lies. This helps me know where to dive deeper in focus groups and when talking to leaders. The other thing is the verbatim comments. These can contain nuggets of gold, but there can be 20,000 comments from one survey in a large-ish organisation. So I personally love the fact that many engagement platform providers have AI synthesis for the verbatim comments now. It takes the thousands of open response fields and summarises the key themes — genuinely helpful for a quick overview of sentiment.
But, and it’s a big but, choosing where to spend 40 hours a week and perhaps five years+ of your life, is a big decision. People want to feel proud when they’re in the pub and someone asks them what they do for a living. That’s emotional territory and surveys don’t capture emotion very well at all. They capture opinions, filtered through whatever mood someone was in on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s a snapshot, not a complete picture.
So the organisations that I’ve seen create EVPs with high resonance (you’ll know because the promise and pillars will have tested very well at validation stage) are the ones that have taken time to listen properly. It can be in person or virtual (with cameras on; facial expressions and body language are a massive part of seeing how someone is feeling). Colleagues are given the space to tell you what it actually feels like to work here and let their language shape the EVP.
This is because up to 95% of our decision-making is now thought to be determined by the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind. So if we only rely on finding out what people think without understanding what they feel, we miss huge parts of their drivers and motivations; ultimately the reasons why people join and why they stay in an organisation.
of our decision-making is thought to be determined by the subconscious mind
Zaltman (2003)2. It got heavily shaped in the boardroom
This one is related to the first, but it’s a different problem. Even when an organisation does invest in research, the findings often get filtered through a leadership lens before they become the final EVP.
What tends to happen is that when the research comes back, it gets presented to the ExCo or the senior stakeholder group, and the conversation shifts. Suddenly it’s not about what employees said or what they feel; it’s about two other things.
First, what they think and feel about the organisation; what they get out of it, what motivates them. This is a completely natural reaction. But a senior leader’s experience of working at an organisation is fundamentally different from that of a graduate, or a warehouse operative, or a nurse on a night shift. They have different levels of autonomy, different visibility into strategy, different day-to-day realities. When they project their own experience onto what “people” want, they’re not lying; they’re just seeing the organisation from a very particular vantage point. Basically, they are not the target audience for the EVP, but it takes a bit of diplomacy from the project team to point that out.
Second, they start thinking about what they would like the organisation to be, what they would like their employees to feel. “We need to lead with innovation” because the CEO is passionate about it. “Resilience should be a pillar” because the CFO thinks people need to hear it. “We can’t say that about flexibility, it’ll set expectations we can’t meet.”
The result is an EVP that sounds like how leadership wants the organisation to feel, rather than how it actually feels to the people it’s supposed to represent.
What I’ve seen work
Test it, honestly, it will help. Before the EVP goes to senior leaders to sign it off, put it back in front of the people whose experience it claims to describe, the actual target audience. When I was making TV ads for Boots, we always, always tested the concept on the actual target audience before it went on air. You can’t hand on heart spend £10 million on something unless you have some confidence it will resonate and drive the behaviour you want. Yes, ExCo still had views, but it was much easier talking through those views because we had tested it on consumers before they saw it. We had data to support what we were presenting in the boardroom.
And that’s what I still do. When I create EVPs with my clients, we test them. Fortunately, there’s a big advantage an EVP has over a consumer TV ad: we usually already have the target audience within the organisation, it’s their EVP. And double bonus; they can also tell you whether what you’ve created feels accurate to what they actually experience.
3. It says what everyone else says
“Our people are at the heart of everything we do.” “We are proud to work in a collaborative, inclusive culture.” “We invest in our people’s development.” Sound familiar? Noble sentiments but sadly you could put any logo on it.
In 1915, Coca-Cola had exactly this problem; brands creating copycat products. So they sent a brief to bottle manufacturers with a single, brilliant instruction: “create a bottle so distinct that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”
The result was the contour bottle; the one you can picture right now as you read this. The ridges that echo the ribs of a cocoa pod, the curves cinched at the waist. Over a century later, you’d still know it blindfolded. That’s what real differentiation looks like; not a clever tagline&hellip. something so deeply yours that people recognise it without seeing the label.
Now think about our EVPs. If we stripped the logos off, would anyone know which brand it was for?
Sometimes I have helped organisations who have done their EVP before. And when I dig into that work I can see that the research surfaced genuine themes, some beautifully insightful reflections of what its people appreciated about working there. But it got polished, refined, run past comms and legal and other stakeholders, and with every new pair of eyes the blander it became. Every rough edge got smoothed out until what was left was something no one could object to, but no one could remember, either.
Now of course, multiple stakeholders genuinely need to have their say. The EVP expresses what the organisation offers its people and what it wants to be known for as an employer. But input really does need to be carefully managed. The number one stakeholder, in a way, is the audience; the people the EVP has to resonate with. Not legal, not comms, and in truth, definitely not the ExCo.
So for the person in-house leading on its development, it requires some courage to care for the integrity of the EVP while it’s being developed.
What I’ve seen work
Differentiation lives in specificity, and in proof points. It takes more than just describing the promise and the pillars; we need to show the evidence. What do we actually do that backs this up? What’s the programme, the policy, the initiative that proves it? If our competitors can make the same claim with no proof either, we’re all just making very similar sounding promises. The organisations that stand out are the ones with proof points.
4. It says the same thing to everyone
Now this is one I see a lot: an organisation develops an EVP and then rolls out exactly the same messaging to every audience. Same pillars, same language, same emphasis; whether they’re talking to an apprentice in Glasgow, a warehouse operative in Leeds, or a software engineer in India.
But those people aren’t looking for the same things. An apprentice wants to know about growth and what the first two years will actually look like. A warehouse operative wants to know about shift patterns and what the breakout areas are like. The software engineer wants to know what tech stack they’ll have access to.
The EVP pillars might be the same across all our audiences, but which ones you dial up, which you dial down, should flex depending on who you’re speaking to. That’s not about creating different EVPs. It’s about understanding that a single proposition can and should land differently for different audiences.
The research stage is where this first goes wrong. If you only consult one slice of the organisation, or worse, treat the findings as one homogeneous voice, you end up with a proposition that technically represents everyone and practically resonates with no one. It’s the average of all experiences, which is no-one’s actual experience.
What I’ve seen work
We build the research with segmentation in mind from the start. That doesn’t mean running separate projects for every audience; it means making sure our focus groups, interviews, and data capture are designed so we can see where the themes overlap and where they diverge. The core EVP stays the same. But the activation, the way it’s expressed, the proof points we lead with, should feel like it was written for the person reading it, not for everyone at once.
5. It doesn’t match reality
The careers site promises flexibility, but managers won’t approve remote working requests. LinkedIn posts celebrate innovation, but every new idea dies in a steering group or committee. The EVP talks about wellbeing, but people are burning out. Glassdoor tells a different story to the one on your website, and candidates read both.
Sometimes the EVP was built entirely aspirationally, reflecting what the organisation wanted to be, but the direction of travel changed. Sometimes it was accurate once, but the business changed and the EVP didn’t keep pace. Either way, the gap between what you say and what people experience is a huge credibility risk.
And this one matters more than any of the others, because it’s about trust. Trust from candidates who are making a life decision based partly on what you’ve told them. Trust with employees who can see the gap every day. When trust starts to erode, it doesn’t just disappear quietly; it turns into negative reviews, disgruntled employees chatting at the watercooler and even attrition. In a market where talent is in high demand, if the promise isn’t delivered, people vote with their feet.
What I’ve seen work
In my experience, the starting point is usually an honest audit of the gap. Some gaps are fixable; policy changes, process improvements, manager capability building. Others mean the EVP needs rewriting to reflect what’s actually true today. Either way, acknowledging the gap is the starting point. Pretending it doesn’t exist is always worse than having one.
If this one resonates, there’s a deeper dive on trust in our article on the say/do gap.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Our EVP research needs to capture what people feel, not just what they consciously report. 95% of decision-making is subconscious.
- ✓Senior leadership will always shape the EVP. The question is whether it’s shaped by their experience of the organisation, or by how they want it to feel.
- ✓If we stripped the logos off our EVPs, would anyone know it was ours? Differentiation lives in specificity and in proof points.
- ✓One EVP doesn’t mean one message. The pillars stay the same; the expression flexes by audience.
- ✓The gap between what we say and what people experience is our biggest credibility risk. And it compounds.
Recognising any of these patterns?
If one or more of these feels familiar, you’re not alone — most organisations I work with are somewhere on this list. If you’d like an outside perspective on what’s getting in the way, drop me a line. Sometimes just a conversation can help clarify the next step.
Coca-Cola contour bottle history drawn from The Coca-Cola Company archives and industry reporting.
Zaltman, G. (2003). How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market. Harvard Business School Press.