Sometimes when we talk to clients about developing and using employee personas we are met with a very valid challenge; why are we putting people into boxes? As a reminder, employee personas are fictional ‘characters’ that summarise needs, motivations and behaviours of employees. At a glance I get that personas might seem like another way of stereotyping people and ‘placing them in a box’. But let me tell yo, this is absolutely not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. Personas are a ‘thinking tool’. They give us insights which can help us to genuinely consider things from different perspectives.
The insights contained within a decent set of employee personas will challenge assumptions and bias. The clue is in the term ‘decent’. Often we begin developing personas by looking at demographics such as age, tenure, job role, location etc. This is a useful starting point when trying to ensure the data you gather to inform your personas is representative – but this type of data doesn’t go far enough. And the problem with relying on demographic data, is that you end of up a set of personas which won’t give you what you need to step into the shoes of the people you are designing experiences for – which is the whole point of developing and using personas!
For example taking this approach might give you the following:
‘Bob’
- Bob is a senior manager who has been with the company for 15 years.
- He works in finance and likes playing golf.
- He is gen X and happy to stay with the company until retirement.
- He is reliable and does what is required to get the job done – no more no less.
The challenge with a persona like this is that it doesn’t make it easy for us to stand in Bob’s shoes. And bias will begin to creep in; we talk about Bob as a ‘he’ who likes golf. Straight away we have a picture of what we think Bob is all about.
So, we need to move on from this approach to build personas which capture needs, motivations, feelings and behaviours – we call these behavioural personas. And we need to remove, where possible, characteristics that facilitate implicit bias in us such as gender.
Behavioural personas provide far richer insight to help us empathise with the people we are designing experiences for. We have to get comfortable with the fact it’s not perfect – but it’s a huge step in the right direction. And one day people teams might have the tech to enable hyper-personalisation, but we aren’t there yet.
Developing employee personas
To develop a robust set of employee personas takes more than a quick workshop or brainstorm. You need to analyse a lot of data; some of which you might have, but most of which you’ll probably need to go out and collect, to avoid making assumptions about what is going on for your people.
We’ve found that it’s often the case that the demographic data is way less relevant than we might have originally thought – for example, look at the saboteur persona below. This is a fictional example, but a persona that often comes up!
We find that actually saboteurs are everywhere, it isn’t an age thing, or a job role thing. But in this example tenure is relevant, the saboteurs have been around a long time! You might not find this is the case in your organisation, in fact you might not have any saboteurs at all! The whole point is don’t make assumptions.
In our next blog on this subject, we’re going to look at how you go about using your employee personas to avoid the ‘persona graveyard’ and we’ll share a great tool to help you put your personas to work.
If you’re interested in developing your employee personas , then drop us a line for a free no-obligation chat.
