At Catapult, we want every day to feel like day one for our team, with the energy, entrepreneurial spirit, and relentless drive of a startup. It’s what motivates us, driving us from one milestone to the next. Like whitewater rafting, it requires us to look ahead – one eye on the next challenge – while also checking and communicating with our team and keeping a watch-out for hazards. 

Catapult’s growth has been rapid and, as we accelerate from one milestone to the next, we need to make sure we’re engaging with our team and fortifying it with people whose values, expectations, and aspirations match our own.

We want Catapult to be a brand that’s unstoppable – inside and outside our organization. When we started out with a small team, our directors took pride in being close to the factory floor, walking around and speaking to people. They still do, but as we continue to scale up, we need to capture the passion and purpose of that personal touch in a way that is consistent, relevant, and inspirational across our growing team. That’s why we’ve taken a step back to get under the skin of our purpose, founding principles, and values in a way that has enabled us to articulate our internal brand identity, communications strategy, and employee value proposition (EVP). 

Developing our EVP

Our EVP is a prominent part of our brand strategy, but what exactly is it – and how have we been able to define it? Sometimes, understanding how and why you’re delivering a great place to work and a workplace culture that people buy into takes an external perspective, as well as your own, so we have worked with our brand agency, Creative Spark, to help us with some vital legwork.

The Creative Spark team did a lot of work around employee brand and culture, interviewing employees and customers, and creating a framework for internal communications and engagement. Then, when we were ready, they ran a three-day business strategy workshop with our leadership team.

A number of things became apparent during this workshop. One was that people and culture are at the heart of Catapult’s success. We have always hired on character and cultural fit over and above skills and experience, seeking “resilient disruptors” with a knack for problem-solving. This can make finding the right fit more challenging and much of our hiring activity has historically come from our existing networks and word of mouth. As the business scales, we need to cast the net wider with a strategic approach to identifying and attracting talent; establishing a clear and compelling EVP will help us do that, as well as enabling us to motivate, inspire, and retain valued employees.

How we developed the right EVP for Catapult

Before we embarked on defining the EVP, we wanted to create a set of standards – or founding principles – that would help us define our company culture.

But those standards had to be more than a set of off-the-shelf corporate values. They needed to be meaningful, bespoke, and unique to our journey as a dynamic disruptor. To achieve that, our leadership team engaged with Creative Spark, and the outcomes of which focus groups were thrown into the melting pot with the insights we’d gained from the employee interviews we did at the start of the process.

We also looked at other businesses and how they talk about their values, which helped us drill down into our uniqueness and come to a final list. The result is a set of standards that feels authentic, with a tone that reflects how we really talk and behave. It’s not a long list – we narrowed our guiding principles down to eight, covering everything from our entrepreneurial drive and customer-first approach, to our desire for simplicity, shared responsibility, and radical transparency. These principles have really informed the work we have done on the EVP, helping us craft the right messaging and positioning.

We actually workshopped three different EVPs, but the one that resonated most was “Redefine your limits,” which is all about embracing growth and personal improvement. It really fits with what Catapult is doing in terms of setting new standards – doing things better and faster while cutting costs for customers – and turning the industry on its head. We developed a positioning statement for it, which brings our EVP to life and outlines the company’s promise to both existing and new employees, offering them a tangible promise of a workplace that will excite and reward them.

Our EVP articulates the core value we provide to our employees, balancing the rational and emotional to reflect our brand and make it relevant to our employees, ensuring they know what to expect from us. It speaks to the individual, enabling them to understand what attributes make them a good fit for our company. It articulates what it is like to work at Catapult, and it explains the experience and benefits of working for us while also communicating a sense of purpose and being part of something.

Open for everyone

It was important that our EVP would be relevant and meaningful across all roles and at every level, and it defines principles that speak to all our internal audiences. With our EVP we’re promising our team an environment where they will be encouraged to embrace growth and personal improvement, benefit from every day being an experience, and gain access to endless opportunities to make an impact. 

Our EVP is not just about what’s tangibly on offer; it’s also about the more emotive, purpose-driven aspects of working for us, which people really value when choosing a place to work.

A good way to think about our EVP is this: if our brand proposition is our position and promise to our customers, then our EVP is our position and promise to our employees. It outlines the “give” and the “get”; what we, as a company expect from our team and what they, in turn, can expect from us.

Delivering value for customers

Ultimately, a motivated, inspired, and talented team will help us drive value for our customers as we scale up, enabling us to continue innovating and transforming our industry. Developing our EVP will help us attract and retain extraordinary people who are passionate about their job and excited about what Catapult can achieve – we’re excited by our direction of travel and looking forward to nurturing the talent that will help us continue the journey.

This story originally appeared here on the Catapult website.