Why people teams can’t get enough of employee personas – part one
What are employee personas (… and how do they differ from pen portraits and archetypes)
Employee personas are popping up in all sorts of places and in different guises. But why? And how useful are they? This is the first post in a series where I share insights from interviews with employee experience (EX) designers and researchers from the UK and US.
Check out the rest of the series:
Post two: Where employee personas make sense (and where you might want to rethink)
Post three: Employee persona watch-outs (coming soon)
Post four: So you want employee personas – a decision-making checklist (coming soon)
A quick intro to employee personas and their cousins pen portraits and archetypes
Employee personas are fictional representations of different types of employees within an organisation, based on common characteristics, for example behaviours, goals and needs. Similar to customer personas used in marketing and customer experience (CX), employee personas help organisations better understand their workforce and tailor experiences to meet the diverse needs of their employees.
Personas help answer the important question: "Who are we designing for?" When personas are effectively deployed in a strategy or design process, they help to increase empathy, allowing strategists and EX designers to connect to the emotions behind employees' needs and identify pain points the designers themselves wouldn’t have experienced.
Creating employee personas involves gathering primary and secondary data and generating insights into employees. As well as analysis of existing people data, additional data is often generated in a variety of ways including surveys, interviews, listening sessions and observation. This data is then synthesised to develop personas that represent different segments of the workforce.
Some terminology
In EX strategy and design, the term ‘persona’ is often used generically to describe personas, as well as two-related but different design tools – pen portraits and archetypes. Let’s look at each in turn.
Archetypes
Employee archetypes are generalised representations of common patterns or themes in employee behaviour, motivation and characteristics seen across broad swathes of the employee population. They are based on universal human experiences and tendencies, rather than specific individuals within the organisation. Employee archetypes help identify and understand broad patterns of behaviour and motivation that are prevalent across the workforce. Labels attached to such archetypes might include monikers such as The Leader, The Innovator, The Mentor, The Team Player etc. Such archetypes represent broad categories of employee behaviour and characteristics that transcend individual differences.
When an organisation has a single, somewhat static set of high-level ‘personas’ deemed to represent all employees across the organisation (sometimes called enterprise personas), these are more likely to be archetypes, than detailed project/task-focused personas. Developing a set of enterprise-level employee archetypes is a common first step for a people team embarking on an EX journey. Archetypes are often deployed as a thinking tool – such as a prompt or validation device – in the strategy development process. They may also show up across multiple projects as a way to keep the employee front of mind. However, archetypes don’t have the detail to inform all stages of the design process where further data and insight will be needed to inform specific design decisions.
Employee archetypes at IBM
IBM was one of the first organisations to make a design-led HR transformation at scale. When it embarked on the transformation, it needed an approachable and scalable way for people to lean into human-centred design. An archetypes framework based on a ‘grid’ of 12 archetypes was the answer. Called the IBM Persona Library (the term most commonly used as a catch-all for all forms of personas), the library drew together common characteristics based on a number of interviews and workforce studies looking at insights into typical employee behaviours, working styles, needs and preferences. The library had three roles (employee, manager, executive) and four levels in each (new to role, experienced in role, recently hired and recently acquired for individuals in organisations new to IBM).
A toolkit also provided blank templates where teams could create additional archetypes in order to deep dive into the needs, pain points, goals and influences of more specific groups. The library was introduced to HR teams with an information pack of guidance on how to create additional archetypes using data and interviews as well as some of the watch outs. The library was rapidly adopted as a tool to help with a wide range of HR strategy and design projects in HR teams around the world.
Former EX and design director Damon Deaner explains:
“It was a very pragmatic approach. Not one for purists. We acknowledged that the archetypes wouldn’t cover everyone in the business, but for the most part they expressed enough about how enough people worked. The library gave the new design teams working in HR a way to talk about our people. They were quickly used early in design projects to bring people’s needs to life from the outset. The fact everyone in HR was using this nomenclature gave a boost to our design-led transformation.”
Pen portraits
Pen portraits are fictional characters representing a group of employees. They are developed using existing data and insights, rather than the output of primary research – a key difference with personas. They tend to be more grounded in demographic data than archetypes (eg age, gender, professional experience, education, job title, department/team, geography, marital/family status etc). They are also more narrative and descriptive than personas, focusing on painting a holistic picture of an individual.
A pen portrait might describe, for example, Ali, a mid-level manager with a background in marketing, who is passionate about mentorship and innovation. Ali thrives in collaborative environments, but struggles with work-life balance due to caregiving responsibilities at home. This detailed description offers a nuanced understanding of Ali’s role within the organisation and their personal and professional dynamics.
Pen portraits can be developed quickly as a tool to inform early strategy or design considerations. They may evolve into more detailed and data-led personas when research has taken place. They are sometimes called proto-personas, as they can be seen as a prototype of the personas to come. Creating pen portraits in workshops and away days is a fun and impactful way to get HR and people teams (and any other team planning an intervention that will impact employees, eg IT, facilities etc) to start exploring employee needs and understand the mindset and tools of EX design.
Pen portraits at Reward Gateway
When the people experience team at Reward Gateway started thinking about embedding design thinking into its approach, it took the opportunity of its annual people team summit to start working together to create a set of pen portraits (or prototype personas) using paper and pen and the collective knowledge of the team. This was very much an early iteration, and the creation process was as important as the pen portraits that were created.
After training and reviewing other types of personas following the summit, the team realised that the pen portraits excluded significant numbers of people.
“We didn’t want to put people into boxes. And we did want people to immediately recognise themselves in our personas. We realised we needed a different approach.”
The next iteration moved away from a geographic or departmental point of view to land a set of five archetype-style personas focused on different behaviours, work styles and preferences (eg people who need a team to do their best work; people who can sit at home and get stuff done etc). They are based on existing, rather than new data, including: HRIS data, existing survey data, focus group data from four other topics.
“One of the biggest objectives for us in developing them was that we could show people the thought we put into designing for them, for example they feature heavily in the new people strategy. We’re not a fan of the HR team sitting over there and doing stuff in secret – we want to break boundaries and be transparent, while acknowledging that this is v 1 and we might only be 75% of the way there. We have creative and innovative people working for us, it would be crazy to do this work and not share it. Sharing this work early helps our teams understand that HR is an intrinsic and dynamic part of the organisation. The personas are now also a tool that other teams can draw on, for example the team designing our new workspace.”
Employee personas
Employee personas are representations of specific segments of employees within an organisation. They are based on data and insight gathered from real employees and are characterised by demographic information, as well as behaviours, goals, needs, and pain points, usually in relation to a specific topic or project.
While employee archetypes focus on broad patterns of behaviour and motivation that apply to all employees, employee personas provide detailed profiles of specific segments of employees within the organisation, allowing for personalised approaches to a wide range of strategy and design challenges that impact employees.
One head of EX I spoke to described how her financial services organisation had used personas as part of the redesign of the employee experience while simultaneously introducing a new HR system. To ensure research into new hire needs was converted into insight that would drive the design of the new onboarding process, the design team created a set of new hire personas as a product of the research phase. The personas helped to identify and articulate pain points that were not previously well understood. These projects demonstrated a real shift to designing for employee needs, rather than focusing on making life easier for HR, and creating and deploying personas was a key part of that shift.
Global telco example
Martin Fitzpatrick, employee communications and engagement director at Ericcson, agrees that personas are a really useful way to shift people, particularly technical and subject matter experts, “from thinking about systems, processes and implementations, into thinking about the human impacts of change and the experience you want to create”. He recounts a powerful application of personas from his time at a telco when he was working in internal communications, with a focus on anti-fraud.
He explains: “There was a growing wave of identity theft. We had done lots of education work about protecting customer information, but it wasn’t having a consistent impact across the organisation.
“To understand more, we built some basic pen portraits representing the different people who talk to customers, for example retail workers, B2B account managers, contact centre employees etc. The pen portraits included an overview of their average day. This led us to see real differences between people, from cultural differences across geographies, to differences between managers and their teams in terms of their drivers and KPIs.
“We decided to zoom in what was identified as a cluster of fraud-related issues in our Indian call centres. Two factors jumped out, firstly that India is a hierarchical and service driven culture, and secondly that people in the call centres largely had little idea of what we were talking about because at the time identity theft wasn’t a thing in India. These factors combined to create an entirely different context to other parts of the business.
“So for our call centre workers in India, we went from creating shallow demo pen portraits, to developing more detailed personas. Going through that work allowed us to see the anomaly and why what we were doing wasn’t working for them and how the messages were irrelevant.
“The audience insight led us to the correct training solution – the personas were a way of getting to the insight, understanding what needed to change and how to get there. Without spending the time deeply understanding our people through the tool of a persona, we would never have got to the solution we landed on – graphic novels as a training tool.
“Put it another way, we could see something we hadn’t seen before. We could see our own preconceptions were incomplete and began to understand our biases about what people wanted to see, hear and think. As a result we were able to rebalance our next set of messages specifically for this audience.”
Check out the rest of the series:
Post two: Where employee personas make sense (and where you might want to rethink)
Post three: Employee persona watch-outs (coming soon)
Post four: So you want employee personas – a decision making checklist (coming soon)
