Prioritizing Employee Value Proposition at Bankers Trust

Talk to any human resources professional at any company and they’ll have no shortage of examples for how the workforce has changed over the last several years. While some changes created chaos, others created opportunity. For example, the strength of the great resignation and its impact on employers led more C-suite executives to put greater emphasis on the need for an employee value proposition.

As a longtime HR professional, employee value proposition was not a new term to me in early 2022. And, my company, Bankers Trust, already had a designated “Premier Workplace” strategic priority. As our executive team narrowed our strategic planning focus for 2022, employee value proposition became a focal point for the year.

Employee Value Proposition

According to Gartner, employee value proposition (EVP) is the set of attributes that the labor market and employee perceive as the value they get through employment in the organization. The attributes include people, work, opportunity, rewards and the organization itself.

Our executive team spent a great deal of time in our annual strategic planning meetings using Gartner’s EVP framework to talk through our Premier Workplace strategy and have an honest conversation about where we saw gaps. Those discussions evolved to identify our barriers to attracting and retaining talent. The next step we took was involving our Management Committee, a group of senior level department leaders across the bank, to join the conversation and find additional gaps in our strategy.

At the same time, our team members were taking part in our biennial employee engagement survey and sharing feedback on some of the very same topics we had discussed as leaders.

Luckily for us, 98% of our team members shared their input, which gave us rich and representative feedback to layer on top of the outcomes from our leadership team discussions. As it turned out, the gaps our Executive and Management Committees identified aligned almost perfectly with the themes employees called out in our survey, which gave us a clear path forward on creating solutions that would address the areas of most interest to our team members.

As a result of our many conversations and feedback, we recently announced our highest priority updates, including:

• Expanded options within our flexible work policy
• More resources to support intentional career development
• More meaningful in-person collaboration with senior leaders

Flexibility was the #1 area our leadership team wanted to work on, and it was also the topic on which we received the most feedback through our engagement survey. So, it was no surprise that employees were excited about the changes we rolled out this fall, and they shared positive feedback with us following the announcement.

Additionally, we’re working on several other Premier Workplace initiatives we’ll announce in the coming months, including how we share our vision, making sure we have motivating and equitable total rewards and expanding our benefits in unique and personalized ways.

Throughout the process, we’ve learned that more than anything, people want to be met where they’re at and treated as unique individuals. It’s part of the larger commitment we have towards what we call, “You Spoke, We Listened,” where we ask team members to share their input and use that feedback to guide how we shape the experience of working at Bankers Trust.

I’m proud of the passion our leadership team brought to these discussions and the solutions they’ve recommended, with many changing long-held ideologies about work and the workplace. We were able to share information and challenge each other to question or recalibrate ideas and create the best solutions for our company and team members.

Not only has our focus on EVP been impactful for our current team, but it will continue providing benefit as we evolve our strategy each year. Developing the right EVP for your organization certainly takes time, but it is an important part of the Premier Workplace strategy that will guide our business as we continue ensuring Bankers Trust is a great place to work.

The Greater Des Moines Partnership created the Workforce Trends and Occupancy Study (WTOS) Playbook in response to Greater Des Moines (DSM) workforce trends research that was conducted in partnership with Baton Global. The WTOS Playbook features insights related to the future of work in DSM, workforce suggestions for businesses in the region and local case study examples.