Dynamik Ventures

For a long time, EVP work was treated as an end point. You define the promise, launch it, and assume the organization now has a clearer story about what people can expect and what is expected from them. I still do EVP work and I like it. Often it is one of the clearest ways to make a company say, in concrete terms, what it wants from people and what it is offering in return. What I’ve become more skeptical about is the standalone version. Not because the work is bad. A lot of EVP work is perfectly good, but doesn’t travel very far inside the business. The issue is usually not buy in. It’s that the organization keeps operating in a way that makes the promise hard to keep. Managers keep making tradeoffs that do not match the promise. Teams are not collaborating optimally because individual success is rewarded higher. HR or Employer Branding ends up carrying alignment through messaging and repetition. So the EVP ends up describing an intent the organization cannot consistently deliver. That is probably the main way my view has changed. I don’t think the answer is to stop doing EVP work. I think the answer is to be more honest about what job it is doing. Sometimes it is there to sharpen the story. And that's fine. But if it is meant to do more than that; if it is meant to help managers lead consistently and make the employee experience less dependent on team by team interpretation, then the organization usually has to change a few practical things around it. Not everything. Just enough to make the promise hold when real decisions are being made. That is usually much less glamorous than the EVP itself. But it matters more. Before starting or refreshing an EVP, the real question is whether your organization is willing to make the promise credible in practice. If not, the EVP will stay a description, not a tool. I have made a simple checklist to pressure test your EVP. Find the link in the comments. #makebusinesshumanagain #EVP #companyculture

If culture is a system, you don’t improve it with a workshop. You improve it by inspecting the system. When I start with leadership teams, we rarely begin with messaging. We start with the mechanics that quietly shape behavior: where decisions keep getting escalated because ownership is fuzzy, what actually gets rewarded regardless of what’s written down, where work slows at handovers, and which mistakes people avoid because the cost feels personal. None of that looks like culture work. It looks like running the business. But small structural fixes there often change behavior faster than months of communication. Not because communication doesn’t matter, but because systems beat intentions. The result you see in fewer escalations, cleaner handovers, and faster decisions. Not glamorous. Effective. #makebusinesshumanagain #companyculture #employerbrand

Most EVP or employer brand challenges aren’t communication problems. They’re system problems. After last week’s post on culture as an operating system ( https://lnkd.in/er2TE7Tp)), a few people asked what that actually looks like in practice. To me it usually shows up in small, but predictable ways: - People escalate decisions that were meant to be owned locally. - Performance reviews reward individual wins while we talk about collaboration. - New priorities are announced, but budgets and incentives still reflect last year. - Leaders ask for speed, yet mistakes quietly get punished. None of this is about mindset. It’s people responding rationally to the environment around them. And as long as that environment stays the same, behavior will too. That’s the moment I stop asking, How do we activate the EVP better? And start asking, What in this system makes the old behavior logical? Because if decision rights, incentives, collaboration structures, information flow, leadership signals and narratives don’t shift, the EVP becomes language. Not leverage. Employer brand can amplify behavior. Only the system determines it. Where do you see the gap most clearly right now? #makebusinesshumanagain #employerbrand #companyculture

There’s something I’ve noticed over the years working on EVP and employer brand projects.   Often the strategy is good. The story is clear. The promise resonates. We launch internally. People nod. Leadership agrees. And yet, months later, very little actually changes. ·     Managers still make the same trade-offs. ·     Collaboration doesn’t improve. ·     Behaviors don’t shift. ·     The EVP becomes language, not reality.   For a long time, I treated this as an adoption or communication problem. Maybe we hadn’t explained it well enough. Maybe we needed more activation.   But over time I realized something else was happening. It wasn’t a messaging problem. It was a system problem.   If incentives reward different behavior, if decision rights haven’t changed, if risk signals stay the same, people will act exactly as before. Rationally. No amount of storytelling can outcompete the system people work in every day.   That changed how I see employer brand work. An EVP isn’t just a story to communicate. It’s a lens on how the organization actually operates. Because what you promise externally is only credible if the underlying system supports it. When the system aligns, an EVP amplifies behavior. When it doesn’t, it becomes copy.   Lately I’ve been describing culture as the system that runs strategy and execution. Designing that system has far more impact than refining the message.   Does your EVP shape behavior, or mostly language? #makebusinesshumanagain #companyculture #cultureasasystem #employerbrand

Two intense workshop days in Thailand 🇹🇭 ✅ Scaling up a Dutch-Thai company without losing its culture, its people and its X-factor. That’s what we, Ernst Schipper and myself, helped define. We looked at strategy, leadership, decision-making and structure. Enabled growed in a way that stays human today and at the same time prepares the company for future expansions, crisis or a potential buy-out. The team at Dynamik Ventures will continue to the help them on their journey in the coming two years. #makebusinesshumanagain #companyculture #strategy #leadership #scaling

Just arrived in Bangkok. Wilco Jung and I are traveling for a new Thai Dynamik Ventures client in the travel industry. Their ambition is clear: they are ready to scale fast and want to do this without losing what makes them strong. We will not just run a one-off kick-off, but rather support them through the whole journey: - Getting the culture and ways of working ready for scale - Designing how new people plug into that system - Aligning structures, processes and even new IT so the technology supports the way they want to work, not the other way around Another proof that culture is a system. If you get that system right, scaling is not about holding on to your culture. It is about making it robust enough to travel across new teams, countries and leaders. Org design, tools, processes, leadership behavior, daily decisions. It all has to fit together if you want growth without losing your edge. There is a line I keep coming back to as we start this work: Businesses drive change through their people. Influence the people, change the world. Looking forward to helping this team grow in a way that feels true to who they are today. #makebusinesshumanagain #companyculture

Culture is not a 'nice-to-have' side project. In fact, it is one of the most underused levers on your P&L. Yet many leaders still ask: What is the business case for investing in culture? Let me break down three ways a strong culture adds directly to your P&L. 1. Productivity Multiple large-scale studies link strong culture and high engagement to double-digit gains in productivity and profitability. Not in theory. In real teams, across industries. For example, Gallup’s meta-analysis of employee engagement data shows around 21% higher profitability for highly engaged teams. So if you run an average EU mid-cap company of 500 skilled white collar people with € 100 million in revenue, a very modest 3% productivity lift due to higher engagement is worth about € 3.000.000 in additional output. 2. Hiring costs and turnover A strong culture and a credible employer brand do two things: - You attract more of the right people without overspending on recruitment. - Your people are more likely to stay. LinkedIn research suggests that strong employer brands can reduce turnover by around 28% and cut cost-per-hire by up to 50%. Back to our average EU mid-cap company. If 15% of your people leave each year, that is 75 hires. Assume a conservative € 8.000 cost per hire. That is € 600.000 hiring costs a year. Reduce turnover by 20%, from 15% to 12%, and you avoid 15 hires. At € 8.000 per hire, that is € 120.000 in hiring costs saved. If your stronger employer brand also reduces cost-per-hire for the remaining 60 hires by a modest 30%, you save another € 144.000. Together that will save you around € 260.000. 3. Onboarding and time-to-productivity Brandon Hall Group found that organizations with strong onboarding improve new-hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. SHRM and Allied Workforce Mobility Survey report that structured onboarding can increase new-hire productivity by about 50%. In our average EU mid-cap company, you now hire about 60 new people a year. With € 100 million in revenue and 500 employees, each fully productive employee contributes roughly € 200.000 per year, or about € 16.700 per month. If better onboarding helps each new hire reach full productivity just one month sooner and we conservatively assume we capture only about half of that value. Let’s round that down to € 8.000 per person. For 60 hires, that is well over € 450.000 in additional value. If we add it up: € 3.000.000 from small productivity gains € 260.000 from lower turnover and hiring costs € 450.000 from faster onboarding That is over € 3.700.000 in potential value, from very conservative assumptions. I know I simplified some of the calculations but with even half of this value there is clear ROI on your culture programs. Where do you see the biggest opportunity in your culture today? #MakeBusinessHumanAgain #CompanyCulture #EmployerBrand #PeopleAndCulture

Most companies say culture matters. Very few treat it as a strategic advantage. When values are vague or purely aspirational, success is often accidental. You hire a few great people, land some clients, have a strong year. But that is not a foundation you can rely on. Sustainable progress starts with values that are actually lived. Not the words from a long workshop. The real ones. The trade-offs people make, the behaviors that get rewarded, the decisions people make when no one is watching. Those values quietly do three critical jobs. - They make you distinctive in the market. - They guide decisions when the answer is not in the playbook. - They determine how new people can bring their strengths and make the whole stronger. Once you are clear on that, strategy becomes much more grounded. You are no longer trying to push a glossy plan into an organization that does not recognize itself in it. You are building a flywheel that fits how your people already think and work, and that can scale with your growth. This is not just a some made up story from a culture consultant. From behavioral science to organizational theory to long-term performance research, leading thinkers like Dan Ariely, Edgar Schein and Jim Collins agree on one thing: when culture aligns what people value with how leaders act and how decisions are made, it becomes a strategic asset that drives motivation, execution and sustained outperformance. In other words, when people see the same story in the strategy, in leadership behavior and in daily decisions, they do better work and the organization does better over time. So I have a simple question for any leadership team: If a new hire worked in your organization for 30 days, then reads your strategy deck and your list of core values. Would they recognize your company in it? Are you ready to turn your organization's culture into a strategic advantage? At Dynamik Ventures we are happy to support you in this journey. #makebusinesshumanagain #companyculture #employerbrand Photo by Rutger Geerling