Your EVP may look fine on paper, but it’s useless if employees don’t feel it every day

In order for an employee value proposition to be useful, it needs to be backed by trust.

During the preconference workshops at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference, Heather LaMarre, associate professor of communication and social influence at Temple University, told the audience that even as overall trust in institutions is at a low point, employees still largely trust their employers to do the right thing, and that perception of trust is the key to a strong employee value proposition.

“Everyone has low trust uniformly across all institutions — news, government, politics, science,” LaMarre said. “They still trust their own employer more and the most. And this means that for people in a CHRO position, a people and culture position, CEOs, you are now getting a new role added to your title that you didn’t sign up for. It’s called ‘trust-broker-in-chief.’”

She also touched on AI, a major source of employee trust erosion lately. LaMarre said that much of this lack of trust stems from the fact that employees believe they are being asked to train their replacements. Communicators need to keep that in mind when they’re crafting EVPs. You need to be able to see the real ways in which trust can erode with employees and how to shore it up through messaging.