Corporate Leadership Council, Employment Value Proposition Survey

Emma at Sky had got the results from this years’ Employment Value Proposition Survey when we spoke earlier in the week (you can read about the Corporate Leadership Council and what they do here: https://www.clc.executiveboard.com)

For the 2008 survey they took responses from 53,000 individuals across 20 different industries to look at the top most important attributes for attracting potential employees.

These were ranked as Compensation, Work-life Balance and Future Career Opportunities.  The last time they did the survey was in 2006 the same three were top just in a different order (work-life balance, future career opportunities and then compensation).

They actually surveyed people against 40 different “attributes” split into five areas (The Opportunity, The Reward, The Work, The Organisation and The People)

When we talked through the results what was interesting was that within “the organisation” category everything is pretty low priority.  This covers subjects like ethics, market position and social responsibility.  These are the sort of topics which are getting a fair bit of coverage right now as a way of becoming an “employer of choice”.  However, when you read a stat that says only 2% of the 53,000 said “customer reputation” was in their top 5 most important things you have to consider how employees are prioritising

Drilling down through the results we looked at the stats from Europe that showed how important things such as flexible work schedule, appropriate workload and predictable working hours are.  At the lower end of the spectrum were things like employee support groups, onsite childcare, job sharing and sabbatical leave options. Interestingly there were very few differences in work life preferences between male and female employees but geographic differences accounted for the majority of variations.

Emma then told me about a massive survey they recently conducted of their 14,000 employees at Sky in the UK.  Part of the survey looked at rating the employee value proposition (why employees think Sky is a great place to work, how the compensation rates against other organisations, etc).  The overall theme was that what Sky employees enjoyed most overall was the team environment.  On the CLC EVP survey “co-worker quality” was only rated in the top 5 by 8% of respondents.  Either the environment at Sky is so superb that it compensates for future career opportunities, salary and work-life balance, etc or perhaps in an organisation where they’ve already got that right it’s the day to day things that you notice.  And working as well as having a great time would be one of those things.