What Is an Employee Persona? Definition, Benefits, and 4 Steps to Effective Persona Creation

To improve employee experience quality, organizations must find new ways to personalize workplaces in line with individual employee goals. Employee personas segment your workforce into similar “micro-groups,” helping to create targeted experiences for employees. In this article, we look at: 

• The definition of employee persona
• Three benefits of using this technique 
• Four steps to effective employee persona creation
   

Workplaces around the world are now increasing their efforts to improve employee experienceOpens a new window quality. According to DeloitteOpens a new window , this is a key priority for 84% of organizations, with better employee experience named among “the top three urgent issues in 2019” for 28%.

And this is directly linked to productivity – organizations who can provide exceptional experiences at the workplace can achieve twice the innovation, two times the customer satisfaction, and 25% higher profits, says the report. 

But how do you personalize experiences for a vast, often distributed workforce?

Is it possible to factor in every unique employee requirement without incurring high expenses and fragmentation?

To answer these questions, organizations are taking a leaf out of their marketing playbook and applying a technique called “employee persona development.” This can help improve experiences at every stage of the employee journey, from recruitment through their tenure to offboarding. 

Learn More: Why You Should Think of the Employee Experience As Your ProductOpens a new window

What Is an Employee Persona? 

Personas are traditionally created in marketing to understand consumer behavior and target marketing strategies accordingly. Instead of looking at the target audience as a homogenous whole, companies segment buyers into groups with common traits, challenges, and desires. This helps in personalizing the marketing message so that it resonates with each group (or persona) on an individual level. 

Similarly, employee personas can help tailor internal experiences for target user groups. Essentially, employee personas can be defined as a reflection of employee groups who share common features – just like customers do. A persona must try to capture as many details as possible in a way that enables simple on-ground execution of employee experience strategies. For example, employee personas can be created by assessing:

• The age group, education, and tenure of the employee
• Their years of experience
• Their career progression over the year
• Their stated career goals
• Their feedback fromOpens a new window title=”Opens a new window” target=”_blank” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”> employee engagement surveysOpens a new window
• How often they have switched jobs
• Their performance metrics showing their career development
• Challenges in the workplace
   

These data points, in addition to anything more relevant to your company culture, can be used to create various employee personas. You can then suitably personalize the candidate experienceOpens a new window or the employee experience. For instance, recruiters can adopt a proactive, hand-holding strategy if the candidate is a high-energy introvert. 

Learn More: Rethinking the Employee Experience in Human-Centric WorkplacesOpens a new window

Three Benefits of Creating Employee Personas

Carefully designed personas offer several benefits. These include: 

1. Increased empathy

Employee personas allow you to accurately visualize how an employee experiences the workplace. Given the fact that most HR teams need to undertake employee journey mappingOpens a new window , you can conduct a walkthrough of the employee journey guided by the persona, making changes according to the employee’s unique point of view. 

2. Streamlined attention

In the modern workplace, new policies, workflows, or technologies shouldn’t be implemented with a one-size-fits-all model. Employee personas help to avoid this common pitfall by segmenting the workforce into targetable and manageable groups. 

3. Easier leadership buy-in

Employee personas are a tangible representation of workforce needs, pain points, and opportunities. They can be showcased to business leaders to obtain buy-in for new solutions, demonstrating why they are necessary for a sizeable employee group. 

So how can go about constructing an employee persona document? It all starts with data, supported by analysis and reviews. 

Learn More: Why Personalization is the Future of the Employee ExperienceOpens a new window

Four Steps to Effective Employee Persona Creation 

Leading companies are leveraging employee personas to optimize specific projects, experiences, and workplace initiatives.

For any large-scale HR initiative, such as designing a company-wide learning and development (L&D) program, creating employee personas is essential. Here’s how the process should look: 

Step 1. Gather both qualitative and quantitative data

Employee surveys can extract valuable data into the initiatives’ efficacy. Datasets should cover both qualitative and quantitative information to present an accurate picture.

For instance, when developing an L&D program for employees, quantitative data would include the number of courses they have successfully completed as adult learners in the past. Qualitative data may include their feedback on various learning modes – audio, video, classroom, and so on.

AI tools such as natural language processing can help condense these findings into actionable data points, revealing employee sentiment that can be used to design the employee experience. 

Step 2. Complement internal data with market research

This step is crucial to the employee persona creation process. Market research will add valuable insights into how workers respond to specific scenarios and behave when faced with experiential triggers.

For instance, you could use historical external data on how employees reacted when major external changes – such as the global economic recession – occurred. Did employees who had transferrable skills suffer a minor blow in comparison to their less-skilled counterparts?

The research stage could also include focus group testing, where you can simulate the experience you want to deliver to a small target group of employees to study their response. These groups could be made up of individuals outside your organization with the same demographic and educational profile as your own employees.

Step 3. Identify similarities and differences

This is where analytics comes in. By passing the datasets through a powerful analytics engine, you can create employee clusters with shared attributes. These will include personality traits, productivity and performance metrics, professional and personal goals, as well as workplace challenges. This forms the basis of the final employee persona library. 

Step 4. Incorporate basic HRIS data and obtain validation

Next, HRIS systems can add operational data such as age, designation, past work experience, internal career progression, and time with the company to significantly enrich datasets. These data points contribute significantly to the employee profile and help group them into target groups.

At this stage, you should be able to spot clear patterns in employee personas and their workplace experiences/behavior.

Finally, another round of focus group tests can help validate the assumptions you have made about the persona of a group of employees. 

Learn More: Tips on Creating a Differentiated Employee ExperienceOpens a new window

The Way Forward: How Tech Could Make Employee Personas Meaningful 

While you could possibly create the entire employee persona manually and in-house, there are several solutions out there to simplify the task.

Analytics company QualtricsOpens a new window offers several solutions that could help in this area, like Stats iQ – a ready-to-use platform for identifying data correlations and converting these correlations into rich visualizations. Qualtrics also has a full suite of data collection aids, including 360-degree feedback software and pulse surveys that contribute to the development of employee personas.

Another useful solution to consider is from XtensioOpens a new window , a business content provider. Xtensio offers an in-depth user persona template that can be customized to meet any HR team’s employee persona needs. It also supports interactive modules for customizable persona document layouts, as well as built-in collaboration. 

As employee experienceOpens a new window becomes a top priority for any future-focused organization, personas will take centerstage when redesigning workflows for maximum impact. By conducting adequate research, gathering comprehensive data from the market, and investing in the right tools, you can ensure that employees’ workplace experiences are perfectly tailored to their individual needs.

And, employee personas will play a critical role in this all-new experiential workplace ecosystem. 

Are you using technology to create employee personas at your organization? Share your insights with us on FacebookOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , or TwitterOpens a new window . We are always listening!