Building an EVP That Works: Turning Psychosocial Risk into Strategic Value

24 July 2025 at 4:40 am
Creating a compelling value proposition for employees is a crucial part of staff retention and satisfaction, especially in a sector that cannot always compete with the commercial and private sectors on a salary-only level.
Recently, Pro Bono Australia held a webinar featuring Pro Bono Australia CEO and Founder Karen Mahlab, Be Recruitment Founding Director Zena Clark and Leading Well CEO and Founder Vanessa Fudge on the topic of “How CEOs can shift psychosocial risk from a compliance burden to strategic value”.
We’ve dug out three golden nuggets from the webinar, that speak to some of the most crucial considerations when creating a well-rounded, attractive EVP (with an emphasis on psychosocial well-being) that will make your organisation an employer of choice within the NFP/for-purpose sector.
Build your house on a solid framework
A good culture must be informed by communication, and this includes listening to employees, allowing for feedback and regular surveying of a workforce so understand their key workplace priorities.
But what do you do once you have that data? What you don’t do is get buried so deep in the data that you get lost looking for patterns. Instead, she says you need to focus on three simple questions:
- What are we looking at?
- So what? Why do we care?
- What do we do with all of these amazing insights that we’ve now gleaned?
“It’s really number three being the critical piece — the ‘now what’,” Clark explains.
Ultimately, the value of the data is only realised when you turn it into action and specifically, actions that correspond with what matters to employees.
This aligns directly with how an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) should be crafted: grounded in data but activated through intentional strategies that create impact.
Authenticity is king
An EVP should go far beyond salary, part of the reason this year’s Salary Survey looked at such a broad range of issues beyond simply benchmarking rates of pay.
“Anything that can negatively impact someone’s health at work is a psychosocial hazard. It’s a big domain,” Fudge explains.
Ultimately, purpose and belonging are shaping up as just as important as how much people are paid, especially in a sector that values equity and fairness.
Employees want to know that their values align with their employer but also that they can speak up and contribute to the organisational mission and culture.
We can also see that EVP culture is evolving and gone are the days when this was simply an HR function. This is now a significant part of any boardroom’s strategic development, of course legally, but also culturally.
Walking the walk
All employers want to stand out and Vanessa Fudge gave us the ultimate gold nugget around how to do that. Ultimately, the development of a true strategic EVP cannot be a tick-box exercise designed solely to mitigate risk for directors.
“We know if we come at this from a purely compliance tick-boxing approach, we’re going to oversimplify something that’s quite complex,” Fudge explains. “You’re going to run the risk of creating a perception of ‘yeah they did something, they ticked the box, but I don’t think they really listened to what we had to say’,” she explains.
Where organisational leaders don’t understand the importance of these issues, they must be brought “on board”.
“Move forward with those leaders, take them on the journey, not hit them over the head… generate an opportunity for them to manage performance and well-being together and sustain productivity soundly,” she explains.
Fudge explained that leaders need “the skills to connect a cohesive enterprise and balance the human needs with the needs of the organisation and its performance requirements in its industry”.
To sum up
A compelling EVP isn’t something you can generate in the boardroom and file away in a drawer. It has to be authentic and a true reflection of what your organisation stands for and how you want to balance what your organisation needs with the needs of your workforce.
If it doesn’t align with what your workforce actually values, it becomes little more than a well-designed book-end, with no practical weight.
Today’s employees are highly attuned to authenticity; they can quickly spot when the promises on paper don’t match the reality on the ground. An EVP that isn’t lived through leadership behaviour, workplace culture, and everyday decisions won’t attract or retain the right people. Instead, it will erode trust and lead to low morale, higher attrition rates and even potentially drive negative organisational reputation as a recruiter.
But an EVP that works in line with the guidance above can do just the opposite and be a powerful driver of workplace success. Because a well-crafted, authentic EVP doesn’t support success, it helps define it.