Encode each value in the list to a string:
[x.encode('UTF8') for x in EmployeeList]
You need to select a valid encoding; do not use str() , as this will use the system standard (for Python 2, which is ASCII), which will not encode all possible code points in a Unicode value.
UTF-8 is capable of encoding the entire Unicode standard, but any code number outside the ASCII range will result in several bytes per character.
However, if all you want to do is test for a specific string, check the unicode string and Python will not automatically encode all values ββwhen testing for this:
u'1001' in EmployeeList.values()
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