It’s common for marketing and sales departments to create buyer or client personas to help them target the right people with the right messages. After all, it’s easier to sell to a “person”—even an imaginary one—than to a vague idea of “someone in the C-Suite.” Personas help marketing teams narrow down prospective clients’ common demographics, education levels, goals, pain points, and needs to make their messages resonate better.
Leaders and HR professionals can find equal value in developing employee personas. Employee personas can help organizations design remote and hybrid work policies, develop people for their career goals, and meet employee concerns with greater empathy.
Personas are simply composite descriptions of a typical person in any group. For example, a typical Chief Financial Officer might be someone approximately 45 to 55 years old with a Master’s degree in Accounting and several years of experience running a financial department for a large corporation or working as a CPA. This persona might include career ambitions, personal details, and typical frustrations the CFO experiences on the job.
Here are four steps to developing useful employee personas and five ideas for when to use them.
How to Develop Employee Personas
1. Decide Your Primary Reason for Developing Personas
Are you trying to design better hybrid or remote work arrangements? Looking for more ways to help employees meet their career goals? Trying to understand how to better meet some of the personal needs of employees? Each of these reasons requires a slightly different approach. Start by identifying why you want to develop the personas.
2. Divide Your Employees Into Groups
Depending on your primary reason for developing personas, your groups may be split by employee needs, level in the organization, or attitudes. For example, suppose you want to offer more robust training and development opportunities. In that case, grouping employees by the level they currently hold in the company might be helpful, such as entry-level, individual contributor, or senior manager. But if you’re looking at work-from-home policies, it might be more beneficial to group people by what they want from a work environment—say, office-first, remote only, or hybrid.
3. Listen to Employees
There are several ways to get input from employees. Start with employee engagement surveys to identify commonalities across the different groups. Then, engage employees in focus groups to give them an opportunity to speak to their needs and attitudes. The key is to ask questions that help you narrow down the differences between groups in preparation for step four.
4. Assemble Your Composite Employee
Take the information you’ve gathered and create a persona that embodies the typical person in each group. You can include details such as typical education level, years of experience, particular pain points or challenges, needs, characteristics, and attitudes. Then, give each composite an alliterative name, choose a representative stock photo, and assemble your composite with a full description.
For example, if you hope to offer more training and development that meets employee needs, you might start with Emily Entry-Level or Aaron Assembly Line. Maybe these employees typically have a high school diploma or some college. They may or may not have a spouse or partner, and they may be fairly young, possibly Gen Z. They may want training and development, but not necessarily anything formal, and it needs to be flexible.
Ideally, you will create four to six composites that provide insight into your typical employees. Now, it’s time to use them. You already have a head start on appropriate times to use them because you should have narrowed down your purpose in Step One.
That said, it is possible to design personas for multiple uses. Here are five scenarios where employee personas can help you create a great employee experience.
5 Ways to Use Your Employee Personas
Designing Remote and Hybrid Work Policies
You probably heard multiple opinions about remote and hybrid work through your employee listening tour. Once you’ve classified those opinions with the personas where they are the most common, you’ll have greater clarity into what employees are looking for in remote work.
Improving Employee Development Opportunities
As you examine employees across different functions and levels, you will likely see common threads emerge about the kinds of opportunities that will best develop them at each level. If your employees’ needs and wants are completely different from the programs you’ve been offering, you can course-correct.
Pinpointing Systemic Challenges
While employee surveys can help uncover systemic challenges in your workplace, they might not provide quite the same insights as a comprehensive employee persona. For example, if you have high turnover at a specific level, employees might not be around long enough to provide feedback via a survey. Developing a persona for that level might help you understand why those employees are leaving and find ways to change the situation.
Coaching Leaders
Your leaders may be unaware of some of the challenges faced by the teams they lead or by people in different functions. Employee personas can help you educate and coach on those challenges in a way that doesn’t reveal personal information. When leaders understand their teams more clearly, they can better meet their needs with empathy and compassion.
Evaluating and Testing Ideas for New Initiatives
Part of designing a great employee experience is knowing how to meet employee needs in practice. Sometimes, that might mean more development opportunities. Other times, it is a comprehensive wellness program or a different emphasis on inclusion issues. Your personas can help you evaluate your initiative’s chances of success and give you insight into how to roll out those programs.
Creating an employee experience that produces team members and alumni who champion your organization to other talent isn’t always simple, but employee personas can help. As you implement your personas, you will start to see better business results and, most importantly, people results.
SELF CHECK:
- Is there one issue or concern that might be clarified by employee personas?
- Do we have personas already? Should we update them?
- What is one way that we could use employee personas to improve our employee experience?
