Don’t let your employee value proposition become a curse

By Lucia Mabasa

Happy staff make for better businesses. We all know this, but what’s the secret sauce to attracting them and once you’ve got them, keeping them? Or in the parlance of human capital, what is your employee value proposition?

It’s something that vexes a lot of human capital directors and more than a few chief executives, as it should, because the landscape has changed dramatically over the last four decades. In the past, a company’s employee value proposition was simply about offering a person a job and contributing towards their medical aid and pension fund. Some of the big multinational companies threw in free company housing and cars too, which was reasonable given that the areas where many mining companies were operating were away from the bright lights of the big cities. Some were very remote indeed.

As employees became more independent – and better skilled – and the work became more specialised the scales tilted even further in the favour of candidates with those skills: shareholding options and financial incentives for making targets, along with the company paying other living costs like water and lights, fuel – even school fees. The Receiver of Revenue was never too far behind and would pounce on opportunities to tax fringe benefits, leading to even more ingenuity from the human capital departments to keep staff happy and committed.

And then came the pandemic and took the entire debate to another dimension. Financial incentives weren’t the only issue, it was now about being able to work remotely – and prioritise family responsibility over corporate obligation once the public health need to stay out of the office passed.

In the same breath, Gen Z and the Millennials started looking for companies that would give them a purpose to work there, whether in terms of the company’s corporate social responsibility in the local community or in the way in which it was positively changing the world.

All of this can be a major headache for the old school chief executives who might have taken the job thinking that all they had to do was hit their targets, return value for the shareholders and make sure their staff got paid well and on time every month, especially in a country where the unemployment rate was 32.9% in the first quarter of this year and slightly higher for new graduates,

But it isn’t like that at all, especially not for those in the high value scarce skills sector of AI and data analysis and even more so if they are from designated groups and they know their worth. Then it all comes down to willing buyer, willing seller. Just how far will a company go to attract the right person – and retain them? Sometimes this takes the form of an array of incentives that ranges from remote work to share participation and even signing on bonuses.

But this isn’t a one-sided negotiation, you make the mistake of thinking that at your peril. The higher the reward, the higher the expectation – on both the person who gets hired and the people who greenlit the package. If the results don’t provide the return on investment, things will get exponentially tougher the higher the cost.

It’s something that candidates appear often unaware of until it is too late. It’s dangerous, it’s highly unpleasant and it can be potentially fatal to your career if the performance management that you will be subjected to doesn’t pay off.

The people who hire you face similar risks to their careers because approving the appointment of the wrong person can be just as bad for their reputations as greenlighting a lemon of a project or the acquisition of a worthless company.

The answer, as it is with everything, is reasonableness. Companies need to be able to attract the best people they can afford and they need to be honest and be transparent about it because if it leaks out that one person is making more than another – or getting special treatment – and yet they are ostensibly doing the same job, you’re opening a brand new Pandora’s Box of problems that at worst will end up in court and at best will destroy staff morale.

The same goes for a company’s purpose and CSI projects. This is not something that you pay lip service to, not if it is something that you’re selling as a reason why people should consider working at your company. Authenticity is a pillar of purpose and anything that rings false because it might just be empty marketing can rebound chronically, and possibly even destroy a company’s reputation.

But, if you get it right: if you pay well, create an enabling and nurturing environment along with the rewards that go with it; from financial to employee wellness, share options, study and, most of all, career development and growth, then you really will be on your way to shooting the lights out.

* Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa. Visit www.pinpointone.co.za to find out more or read her previous columns on leadership; avoiding the pitfalls of the boardroom and becoming the best C-suite executive you can be.