Värdegrundens betydelse för arbetsgivarens attraktivitet
During the past decades the competition for skilful employees has increased and companies and organizations compete to attract the right people. The Swedish municipalities and country councils need to recruit 420 000 new employees before 2020, but have a limited budget to promote themselves as attractive employers. To find a solution, many of the municipalities have started to work with fundamental values to become more attractive employers and to inspire employees to use word-of-mouth to recommend them. There are no empirical studies of how successful this strategy is, and the purpose of this thesis is to show if there are significant correlations between the fundamental values, the employer's attractiveness and word-of-mouth. The results of the study are based on a survey with 1996 answers from employees in three different municipalities in Stockholm, Sweden. The investigated values are the ones chosen by the municipalities: Engagement, Professional, Communication, Cooperation, Innovation, New thinking, Openness and Availability. The survey shows that there are no general correlations between the values and the employer's attractiveness, or the employees' word-of-mouth. The value that influences attractiveness and word-of-mouth in all municipalities is Engagement, regardless if the employer has chosen to include it in the fundamental values or not. There are more values that affect word-of-mouth directly than indirectly by the employer's attractiveness. The consequence of the study in the future is that the employers need to do empirical studies before deciding what values to use in their fundamental values, in order to understand which have a correlation to the employees' perceived attractiveness. This is necessary in order to be able to use fundamental values in a successful employer branding strategy.