Employee personas - what they are and why your HR team needs them
If you’re planning a total rewards communication strategy, seeking creative ways to communicate employee benefits or considering an employee benefits communication campaign, there’s one tool you can’t do without. Employee personas.
This employee communication tool is the key to building employee-led, bottom-up, personalised communication. The kind of communication that resonates with employees and builds a better employee reward experience.
In this article you’ll find out:
What employee personas are
Why they’re more important than ever before
Four simple steps to creating effective employee personas for your organisation
The difference between employee segmentation and employee personas
The benefits of using employee personas
What is an employee persona?
Over the past few decades, marketing teams have developed an arsenal of tools to help them better understand and communicate with customers. At the heart of these marketing, toolkits are customer personas.
These personas describe the different types of customer who might want to buy a business’ products or services. They’re used to group similar people together and summarise their traits, characteristics, thoughts and feelings. Giving marketers the insight to communicate effectively with different groups of people.
These tools are so successful that HR teams have adopted the approach by creating employee personas. The only difference is that, instead of customers, the personas relate to groups of employees. And instead of being used to communicate about products and services, they’re used to enhance the organisation’s employee experience and communications - including reward communications.
Why employee personas are more relevant than ever before
Communicating about pay and benefits is tricky. Research shows that only just over half (51%) of organisations feel their employee benefit communications are very effective with the remainder stating that they’re ‘somewhat’ or ‘not very’ effective.
This data reveals that there’s a long way to go to ensure your reward spend delivers an optimal return on investment.
And there’s another challenge facing HR teams too. As the generational make-up of your workforce changes, attitudes, expectations and needs alter. And this has an impact not only on the reward package you provide but on what and how you communicate.
As older generations take up a smaller proportion of the workforce, younger generations will come to the fore. Presenting your business with a new world view and different demands that you’ll need to find ways to meet.
Here’s how your employee mix is likely to develop between now and 2025 and 2030.
Source: Anita Lettink
Each demographic has different communication preferences, interests, attitudes and characteristics. All of which will impact what and how you communicate with them.
However, using demographics as the basis for your employee experience personas won’t help your total reward strategy communications to cut through. Because these demographic descriptors only provide a broad brush stroke image at a high - and therefore highly summarised - level.
Source: Barclays
This kind of information gives us some insight into each generation. But it’s very high level and most doesn’t relate to work, money or employee benefits.
Also, there’s no way demographic descriptors can reflect the specific type of people - with particular skill sets, behaviours and ways of thinking - you recruit to your business. For example, perhaps you’re a tech company with highly analytical people who take a data-based approach to problem-solving. Generational descriptors simply won't capture these kinds of skews. And this is problematic when you try to communicate with your employees.
The key to unlocking great employee communication is to truly understand your people’s mindset by creating a small number of employee personas which capture different types of people.
How to create an effective employee persona
The information you base your employee personas on will depend on what you intend to use them for. Personas being used to improve the employee experience as a whole would be broader than personas being used to develop employee reward communications. As a result, there’s really no such thing as a standard employee persona template because each organisation, its employees and communication goals will differ.
The kind of employee persona questions that would typically be asked to develop broad employee experience personas include:
Age, education, and tenure of the employee
Years of experience
Career progression and aspirations
Feedback from employee engagement surveys
How often they have switched jobs
Their performance metrics showing their career development
Challenges in the workplace
The answers to questions based on these areas will give you the information you need to improve key touch points throughout the employee experience. But if you want to communicate with your employees about pay or benefits more effectively you will need to include more specific employee persona questions like:
Age range
Typical job level
Family status
In relation to pay and benefits
Pain points
What they most value
Objections/blockers
Personality/decision-making approach
Introvert/extrovert
Analytical/creative
Open/closed to new ideas
Motivations
Achievement/growth
Power
If you think about your team, you’ll know that no two people are exactly the same. They’ll have different personal situations, education, skills, outlooks and drivers, which means they’ll have different expectations from your organisation.
Multiply this up across your enterprise and you’ll find a dizzying array of individuals, each wanting and needing something different from your communications. This is where employee personas come in - they cut through the noise by helping you group similar people together so you can find commonalities between employees.
The information you include in your employee experience personas should help you understand the full range of perspectives, challenges and motivations of your employees. And, by crafting a handful of distinct employee types with your personas, you’ll find it easier and more cost and time-efficient to create personalised communications that will resonate with your people.
Four steps to creating brilliant employee personas
Depending on the size of your business and HR team, you might want to go to different lengths to develop your personas. The following steps set out a best practice approach, but it is possible to shortcut this approach and carry out the exercise internally within your HR team using your knowledge of the business and its people. However, while this tactic is quicker, it might not always give an accurate description of your employees.
1 - Gather quantitative and qualitative information from across your organisation
Start by listening to your employees. You’ll need to ask your employees questions about their goals, aspirations, needs, challenges, pain points to provide the information you can use to categorise employees into similar groupings.
You should also include questions that allow you to incorporate hard data - like age bracket, time with company and career level - to enrich your data set.
Don’t forget to identify employees at different stages of the employee lifecycle so you can spot any specific reward communication challenges at different points of employees’ relationship with your organisation. For example, your reward communications might be very strong at recruitment but tail off once people have joined or when they’re nearing retirement.
2 - Decide on initial employee groups as the basis of your personas
Armed with your data, you should be able to see a number of groups with shared experiences, pain points and motivations. You can use software to do this, or rely on the people power within your HR team, or work with an external consultant to help you with this process. It will all depend on your resources and whether you have any software in-house or the budget to pay for the technology if you don’t.
3 - Build out your employee personas with interviews
Now it’s time to build a narrative around each persona by interviewing representative people. Include a diverse range of ages, roles and seniority and use each interview to dig a little deeper into their responses.
4 - Finalise and validate your employee personas
Bring together all your information to create your personas. You can give each one a name, add a photo and write a backstory based on your research to bring them to life. To ensure you’ve got your employee personas right, go back to your employees to see whether they resonate. Can they identify with one of the personas?
Wondering what your finished employee persona should look like? Here’s an employee persona sample:
Source: Capterra
What’s the difference between employee segmentation and employee personas?
If you already segment your employee data, you might think you’re well on your way to understanding your employees. But employee data segmentation and employee personas are different beasts.
Employee segmentation
Employees are split into groups based solely on data like:
Age
Location
Marital/family status
Job grade and role
Salary and benefit band
Employee personas
Employees are split into groups based on qualitative information like:
Personal motivations
Likes and dislikes
Decision-making process
Communication preferences
Employee personas build a far more detailed picture of your employees, including more emotive information like personal motivations and what they value in an employer. This enables you to use this insight to deliver a more relevant and multi-dimensional reward communication experience.
What are the benefits of using employee personas?
In the marketing world, there’s a clear correlation between personalisation and profit. According to Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a business with personalised offerings according to individual preference.
Source: Sage
But what does this mean for your employee reward communications? After all, your organisation isn’t selling products or services to your employees. Or are you?
When it comes to reward communications, you’re selling an idea - like your compensation philosophy or the fact that you care for your employees because you provide them with benefits. You could try communicating the information in an organisation-led way by telling your people what they need to hear in the way you think they want to hear it.
Or you could use customer personas to communicate in an employee-led way. This will focus your communications on what your people want and need to hear in the way they want to hear it.
Ensuring you’re in a better position to more effectively communicate about your reward programmes. Be that improving how you communicate benefit changes to employees or establishing strong pension communications or compensation communications to employees. Your communications will be on point from your employees’ perspective enabling you to cut through and land important messages.
In conclusion
With so much information to wade through on a daily basis, employees are far more likely to engage with information that’s interesting, relatable and personal to them. Which is why employee personas are a must-have in your reward communication toolkit.
With this degree of insight you will be able to:
Clearly define your employees’ communication needs
Establish an effective reward communication strategy or employee benefits communication plan
Communicate important information - like your company’s wellbeing programme - in a way that resonates with your employees
Inform and educate in a way that feels targeted and helpful to your employees
Encourage people to take action like signing up to a benefit or increasing their pension contributions
Increase click-throughs and email open rates
Ensure your people feel that your business understands and cares about them
Drive your ROI in employee reward
Find out how developing employee personas helped WYG create an effective employee wellbeing communication plan.
Find out how I can help you deliver powerful communications to your customers and staff. Get in touch on 07703 155 404 or at becky@clarioncallcomms.co.uk.