Peter Cheese took to the stage for the opening keynote. I wasn’t quick enough to get a seat, but nevertheless I was able to huddle at the entrance and hear him reflect on fourteen years of extraordinary change across the world of work. AI, hybrid working, shifting employee expectations, economic uncertainty, new technologies. The list was familiar because we've all been living it.
What stayed with me was the quote he chose to end with.
"The best way to predict the future is to shape it."
Sounds sensible, and pretty poetic.
But if we’re shaping the future of work, we should probably be able to answer a fairly basic question:
A question for organisations: what are we actually trying to create?
Over two days, my team and I heard conversations about AI, productivity, workforce planning, leadership, wellbeing, inclusion, retention and employee experience.
The more we listened, the more they sounded like the same conversation. Whether leaders were discussing technology, benefits, management capability or culture, they were all grappling with a version of the same challenge: how do we create an organisation that people want to be part of?
That's where I think Employee Value Proposition becomes far more interesting than the way it's often discussed.
Too often, EVP gets reduced to attraction. A careers page. An employer brand campaign. A list of reasons somebody should join your organisation.
But if Peter Cheese's challenge is to shape the future of work, then EVP becomes something much bigger. It becomes the articulation of the experience you're trying to create for the people already there.
And almost every conversation we had at Festival of Work reinforced that idea.
The concern is that many organisations are investing enormous effort into changing work, without always being clear about the experience they want people to have as a result.
The conversations we kept having
Our Talent Acquisition expert, Maddy, had more conversations than she could count about organisations experiences and uses of AI in the recruitment space. Despite the headlines, very few organisations were using AI to make hiring decisions. Most were using it to remove administration, improve communication and free up time for recruiters to do what humans tend to do better: build relationships, apply judgement and understand context.
On the face of it, that's a technology conversation. But more importantly, it's a conversation about employee experience. About how work gets done, where human interaction adds value and what employees can expect from the organisation they're part of.
My colleague Kirsty, one of our Employee Benefits Consultants, spoke to organisations reviewing their benefits offering, not because the benefits themselves were poor, but because employees didn't understand what was available. The investment was there. The value wasn't being experienced.
We had similar discussions around management capability. Leaders talked about embedding flexibility, supporting wellbeing and creating meaningful development opportunities. Yet employees don't experience those things through policies. They experience them through managers, through day-to-day decisions and through the culture that emerges when nobody is looking.
Again and again, the conversation came back to the same point. Not what organisations were offering but what employees were actually experiencing.
What EVP really means
For all our talk about transformation in the HR world, many organisations are still wrestling with something fundamental: the gap between intention and experience.
That's why I think Peter Cheese's challenge is so relevant.
Shaping the future of work isn't simply about adopting new technology, redesigning structures or responding to external change.
It's about being intentional about the experience you're creating and ensuring that experience shows up consistently in everyday working life.
Employees don't experience strategy.
They experience work.
They experience whether managers have meaningful conversations, whether development opportunities feel accessible, whether flexibility is trusted and whether leaders behave consistently when things become difficult.
Every one of those moments shapes how people feel about working for an organisation.
Every one of those moments contributes to its EVP.
Back to Peter’s challenge
Which brings us back to Peter Cheese's quote.
“The best way to predict the future is to shape it”.
EVP provides organisations with a practical way of answering the next question:
What future are we shaping, and why would people want to be part of it?
Because the organisations that thrive over the next decade won't simply be the ones that move fastest.
They'll be the ones that are most deliberate about the experience they create for the people who power their business.
