It needed to reflect the authenticity of working-life as well as acting as a powerful attractor of talent. Not only was EVP a key part of the business transformational Project PRIDE, but it also had to work measurably across a group of disparate businesses and diverse skillsets.
As workstream leader of the EVP project and head of learning and development for Rank Group, first and foremost I had to make sure there was going to be a measurable return on our EVP - we're a practical business and everything we do is geared to delivering value.
Secondly, our proposition needed to work for 8,700 employees, thousands of external candidates and numerous other stakeholders across both 'bricks and mortar' and digital businesses. On top of that, we needed a brand promise that would authenticate the truths of working for operations as different as Grosvenor Casinos, Mecca Bingo, Rank Interactive (which includes Blue Square) and our centralised support office.
Even though the scale and complexity of the challenge was enormous, we opted, with our partners in the Project PRIDE initiative, RPOZone, to establish practices that are best-in-class and able to be benchmarked against leaders in leisure, retail and all other sectors. That meant starting with an employee segmentation which identified the key primary drivers amongst our employees, testing for alignment with external candidates, then using that five-strong segmented family as the base to build our EVP.
It took nearly six months to research and create the Employee Segmentation Model and EVP, but given that 'Inclusion' was at the very heart of what we wanted to achieve, it was vital to be as inclusive as possible, which meant directly involving over 600 of our employees, as well as external research groups. We made sure to measure generationally - Gen Y, Gen X, Babyboomer and Veterans - as well as equitably across Gender, Ethnicity and other groups. If the research threw up some interesting insights, then the subsequent testing of EVP platforms was even more thought-provoking.
We now understand more than ever what our people need from us and what we can deliver to them, whatever their particular requirements and ambitions. I worked closely with the communications and inclusion director of RPOZone, Steve McNally, and we gradually realised that there was a core DNA particular to us as a Group, which revealed itself across all our brands, functions and demographics.
In essence what The Rank Group EVP expresses is that we are a business where candidates, customers, the community and many other stakeholders count, so our EVP is 'Where Everyone Counts'. It's totally inclusive and we're now embedding it across onboarding and induction, learning & development, employee advocacy and all our people functions, much deeper than just the Recruitment function.
Lee Moody is head of learning and development at The Rank Group