Last week I ran a webinar for our friends at Simply Communicate. I was talking about our innovative approach to internal comms, which uses design thinking to deliver a meaningful and effective communication experience (we call this IC by Design). Whenever we run these sessions one of the elements that always sparks conversation and questions is developing your employee personas…
Employee personas allow you to design the employee experience from the perspective of your people. They’re a thinking tool that enables you to quickly understand a problem, or indeed anything, from the perspective of your people. In short, they allow you to step into the shoes of your people and see the world from their point of view.
We’ve been developing and using personas for over 20 years and they are a complete game changer. When we first started using personas it’s fair to say they were more ‘demographic’, detailing characteristics such as job type, location, tenure and generation. As we have evolved our approach over the years, we have developed employee personas based on behaviours, needs and motivations, which are far more effective and useful when designing experiences.
How do we create employee personas?
Employee personas should be evidence-based and consolidate quantitative and qualitative data. That way, they help to overcome biases we may have – for example ‘engineers want this’ and ‘front line managers think in this way’. What we find is that certain behaviours, needs and motivations can cut across a range of demographics.
When we work with clients to develop, and then use employee personas, we can quickly understand why experiences are broken, or how to design a solution that is going to work. For example, we recently reviewed a recognition scheme through the lens of some employee personas we had developed for a client. Very quickly it became clear why the recognition scheme wasn’t working; it had been designed by a small group without taking into consideration the needs and motivations of different employees. A few simple changes to the scheme had an immediate impact.
If you’d like to find out more about developing your employee personas you can:
- download our guide ‘the power of personas’
- come along to one of our courses:
- IC by Design – designed specifically for internal communicators
- EX by Design – designed for anyone working HR, L&D, OD, EX and Engagement
- Or get in touch to find out more about how we can help you to design and use employee personas in your organisation
Employee personas aren’t about putting people in boxes, they will help you to better understand how people feel. And this means you can better meet their needs and add value to their experience – helping them stay longer, be more productive, embrace innovation and become advocates for the business.
