Why people teams can’t get enough of employee personas –part three
More watch-outs from those in the know (ownership and lifespan)
This is part three in a four-part series looking at how organisations use employee personas and what can be learned. In this post I reflect on some of the less talked about watch-outs when using employee personas in defining your employee experience (EX) strategy or in an EX design process.
Post one: What are employee personas (and how do they differ from pen portraits and archetypes)
Post four: So you think you need employee personas – a decision-making checklist (coming soon)
Employee personas are created as representations of data and insight at a point in time. As personas age, their relevance declines because the real world moves on – people change, the context changes, people’s needs, expectations and behaviours evolve. As Catie Henderson, senior manager global associate experience at Mars explains:
“People are dynamic, not static. Personas are out of date as soon as they are published and should never be treated as an enduring guide to employee needs.”
In practice, this flags a few watch-outs when it comes to developing, using and looking after personas.
Lift and shift
The most potent personas tend to be developed in the design process with a specific need in mind. For example, designing the employee experience around the introduction of a new HRIS. Or understanding and planning for the impact of a new change or learning programme. The list of possible design challenges where personas might pop up is limitless. However, the problem arises when employee personas created for one design focus are dropped into an entirely different design project. A project for which they were not built, and where the data is misaligned. This at best renders personas ineffective as a design tool, and at worse, misleading and potentially dangerous.
Ownership
As a design tool, personas don’t work in a vacuum. If you drop them into a design process without proper stewardship, they can fail to have an impact (or worse still, create unintentional consequences – see post two). According to the researchers, EX designers and strategists I spoke with, depending on where personas are being used and their intended reach, there may be an educational effort required. And somebody will need to lead that educational effort. Ownership is often talked about in relation to keeping enterprise-level personas up to date and relevant, but it’s just as important in the short-term when using personas in a specific design process. Lindsay Bousman, director of talent development at Opendoor, explains:
“I’ve seen instances where personas start out as a good lens, but without an active champion to keep them meaningfully at the forefront of the process, the work can proceed without them and the team can slip back into old habits.”
Excessive longevity of archetypes
Archetypes (versus personas) are most likely to be associated with longevity and wide application. But this too comes with specific concerns. Lindsay Bousman has worked with design principles in employee experience for some time. However, in her new role she has put the development of employee archetypes on hold. She explained how she had planned to create a few employee archetypes to represent different segments of the workforce (see post one for an explanation of archetypes, versus personas) as a way to brainstorm, empathise and think through what different groups need.
“I originally thought I’d get all the employee data and make sense of segments looking at that and talking to business leaders. I thought that through that conversation and information four or five distinct types of employees would emerge. And that we could plug and play – with a little adjustment – as a starting point in almost any new people project. I now see that introducing four stagnant segments is not what this company needs. For different people projects, there will be different resistance / excitement factors, archetypes would be too prescribed and we need something more organic and dynamic for the projects we’re working on. We just aren’t ready yet for personas or archetypes – we have to work our way into readiness.”
Collaboration
Design research and innovation consultant Tyler Medina recognises that who develops and owns personas influences their application and the return on investment. And he goes on to suggest that it can be a good thing when employee personas are created somewhere other than HR. He explains:
“It’s about systemic value generation. For example, a research team will have employee insights to sell. Personas are a way to sell the insights and get them used. Because they come from a research team rather than HR, it’s easier to engage a wider range of stakeholders around a new insight and what might need to change for the benefit of employees and the business. Creating that engagement can involve a range of techniques, not just personas. When product and the wider business gets involved, things can really take off.”
To support his point, Tyler shares the example of the development of attitudinal personas for frontline technicians working in a consumer-facing tech repair network.
“These frontline technicians were the first point of contact for customers. We did listening sessions, Zoom observations and some design activities to try and understand their thinking; how they viewed their work; and what they see as the purpose for their work. From this we developed three attitudinal personas that represented thousands of frontline employees. For example, the puzzle solver was motivated by gnarly tech problems where they could showcase their expertise. Knowing this is their first purpose in the role, we can build structures and systems around that, for example putting puzzle solvers at the escalation point where there are the hardest problems to solve.
“So many of our products and services had technicians as a core part of the work. Because our design team reported in to product, we were quickly able to engage the 20 teams who could use the insight to get the best out of these people in ways that were meaningful for them also. You have to think broadly and with a value generation focus to get the return on investment out of personas.”
Personas as a substitute for data
As mentioned in post two, sometimes personas appear as a substitute for something else. When that gap is data, there’s a problem. To be meaningful, any type of persona should be built on data. However, one organisation I spoke to highlighted the absence of any enterprise-level employee data, admitting that the only data available was an annual engagement survey, an exit survey and a new candidate survey. These are organisational indicators, rather than data that enables a design team to deeply understand its people. In the absence of any meaningful data, the HR team is using an old set of employee personas to answer all sorts of people questions.
Reflecting on this example, and others like it across organisations, Catie Henderson, senior manager global associate experience at Mars concludes:
“You can’t treat the data and personas in that way. Personas may represent an aggregated version of the questions you’re asking. But if you’re not asking all the questions, it’s meaningless.”
Coming soon: See post 4 – So you think you need employee personas – a decision-making checklist
