Personas are fictional characters representing groups of employees that enable you to design the employee experience from the perspective of your people. That means you can better meet their needs and add value to their experience – helping them stay longer, be advocates for the business, be more productive and embrace innovation.
We recently published our ‘Power of Personas’ to help you get started. You can download the guide here, and in it you’ll discover:
- What personas are
- And why we need them
- The 7 simple steps to take to develop your personas
- How to run an insight workshop to make sense of your data
- A simple checklist to help you get started
But developing your personas is just the beginning, you need to ensure you put them to work and avoid the ‘personas graveyard’.
A great way to start using your personas to design experiences is to use an ‘empathy map’. An empathy map is a simple tool that enables you better understand an experience from the perspective of your different personas. They enable you to collaboratively visualise and articulate what is known know about a particular persona’s experience across a journey or a moment that matters.
You can use an empathy map to help you understand what a persona thinks and feels, says and does, sees and hears. Using these insights it is then possible to deduce pains they are trying to avoid or overcome and gains they are seeking.
Let’s look at an example. We worked with a client to help them re-design their on-boarding experience. The employee experience design process we took them through involved developing employee personas, then using an empathy map to understand the different perspectives of each persona in relation to both the current on-boarding experience (the ‘as-is’) and the future, desired onboarding experience (the ‘to-be’).
The empathy map activity revealed a variety of different pains and gains for on-boarding across the different personas; it was clear a ‘one-size fits all’ approach to on-boarding was not working.
For example, for one persona it was clear they needed a very personal approach, meeting their team and manager on day one, and learning about the company culture from their peers. This persona felt overwhelmed with too much information prior to their day one, and did not cope with detailed on-boarding packs or videos.
However there was another persona who welcomed detailed information prior to their day one. They wanted a full itinerary for their first few weeks, and they wanted to know what was expected. Using empathy maps enabled the team to design and deliver a much more personalised approach to on-boarding to ensure new starters experienced a welcome that met their needs more effectively than a standardised approach.
Creating empathy maps for your personas is a great way to interrogate, make sense of the data, create and share insights. Not only do empathy maps help to externalize knowledge about employee needs, but they also help ensure a shared understanding that will lay the foundations for the experiences you are designing.
If you would like to find out more about developing personas or how to use your personas to design brilliant experiences we’d love to hear from you
