Why people teams can’t get enough of employee personas – part two
Where employee personas make sense (and where you might want to rethink)
This is part two in a series looking at how organisations use employee personas and what can be learnt from their experience.
Post one: What are employee personas (and how do they differ from pen portraits and archetypes)
Post three: More employee persona watch-outs – ownership and lifespan matter (coming soon)
Post four: So you think you need employee personas – a decision-making checklist (coming soon)
In this post I look at why employee personas are popular in people teams and beyond. I use the term personas as a collective term to include pen portraits and archetypes, as is common in employee experience (EX) design. Where it is helpful, I also highlight archetypes and pen portraits as specific tools, distinct to employee personas,
Based on my conversations with EX designers, researchers and heads of EX, I have grouped the reasons behind the popularity of personas into four areas. In each area I have flagged where a decision to develop personas might warrant further thought – ie not every gap in the EX designer’s toolbox is persona-shaped (despite what some might have you think). The growing interest in employee personas stems from four main reasons:
Multiple applications
Visual appeal
Evidence of innovation
Easy to create
Multiple applications
Personas are the Swiss army knife of design – a tool with multiple practical applications across all design phases. They help teams focus on who they are designing for. Drawing on personas throughout the design process keeps employees' experience at the centre of design decisions at a strategy and solution level. In Employee Experience by Design – How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage (second edition Kogan Page, 2024) we explain how EX design can be thought of in three phases: strategy, opportunity/problem and solution. There is a discovery and definition process in each phase. Personas are used widely in each of the three phases.
Phase one: Discover and define your EX strategy
Employee archetypes are often used in the strategy development process, for example as a way to define a strategy based around specific EX priorities and/or to understand the impact of strategy on different groups. Archetypes are also used to bring a strategy to life for different stakeholders (see Reward Gateway example in post one).
Phase two: Discover and define the opportunity to improve an area of EX
This, the heart of the design process, is where I believe personas have the greatest impact and are most frequently put to work to great effect. Personas in all guises are used to plan a discovery process at the beginning of a new design project, helping to frame the research programme and ensure it generates the right level of data from the right people. At the end of this research process (as well as at various points throughout), employee personas are also a vital tool in turning discovery data into insight. As individualised portraits of what’s happening to small or large groups of people, they help humanise bigger picture trends in employee data. In design terminology, this is described as redefining the design problem/opportunity from the user’s perspective (see telco example in post one). Personas are also powerful in communicating that insight to stakeholders to unlock or energise the next stage of the design process.
Thank you to Pierre Delinois, a Nashville-based consultant specialising in innovation, product, strategy and culture, for this illustration of how personas can be developed and applied in this way as part of a talent strategy.
An HR business partner (HBRP) learns from operational team leaders that customer service reps seem to be leaving in higher volumes than normal.
The HRBP requests an attrition study to learn what's going on.
The people analytics team completes a year-on-year analysis of attrition and employee survival (median time to departure) concluding that attrition rate and velocity have increased and are significant in this employee segment. But they don't know why.
The HRBP conducts a qualitative research study, focusing on locations and teams where attrition has worsened. This involves interviewing current and former employees to understand their desires and unmet needs.
The HRBP synthesises this data and translates qualitative insights into personas which are documented and shared with learning and development, compensation, and other relevant centres of excellence. The personas are used to help define relevant programmes and interventions.
Phase three: Discover and define the solution to improve an area of EX
When it comes to generating, prioritising and selecting ideas to solve an EX problem or realise an opportunity, personas are a critical tool. They are useful in a number of ways, not least in ensuring the design team stays focused on genuine employee needs (not assumptions) and prioritising the different elements of their design to meet those needs. Personas at this stage of the design process are often well-researched design personas. However, for simple or rapid design projects, archetypes or high level pen portraits may suffice. When a prototype has been developed, personas in all their guises can also be useful for planning a testing regime.
Find out more about the EX design framework in Employee Experience by Design – How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage (second edition Kogan Page, 2024)
2. Visual appeal
There are many tools associated with EX design – these are borrowed from a range of disciplines from customer experience (CX), to service design, user design and more. In a line-up of these tools, personas often stand out as they look nice and they’re fun. Using employee personas as a way to make insights accessible and actionable (see above and examples in post one), makes a lot of sense. But creating them solely because they look nice might not be a valid reason to develop personas.
Employee personas need to perform a job. If you are spending time and money creating them, it’s vital to be clear what that job is. It’s also important to ensure personas are the right tool for the right job. For example, employee personas can be a great way to make insights digestible, but they’re not the only way to achieve that. EX designers might choose to deploy a variety of different tools depending on what they are trying to do.
For example, one global travel tech company did a deep discovery into the experience of working in the organisation (part of the scoping or strategy phase of the company’s early EX work). This was distilled into a high-production quality document about the state of EX based on a model of 12 focus areas through which the EX team was able to abstract a small number of broad themes – the big opportunities that stitched all of the insights together. Rather than a set of employee personas that would have made little sense in a culture with no experience of design, this document managed to bring the EX strategy to life in a way that resonated with senior stakeholders.
Depending on what is needed to aid the design process, alternatives to employee personas to generate or communicate insights in the design process include:
User stories – concise, informal sentences written from the perspective of an end user or customer, used to inform design decisions. User stories (also called scenarios or user cases) highlight a user problem or need to enable designers to determine which features to prioritise and build into a product or service.
Journey map – a visual representation of the steps a user takes to accomplish a particular task or goal. They focus on the users’ interactions and experiences across different touchpoints, helping to identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where the users’ needs are not being met.
Empathy map – a visual tool that helps designers understand users' perspectives and experiences. They typically include sections for capturing what users say, think, feel, and do, as well as their pain points and goals. These can be used instead of or in addition to personas.
Interviews and quotes – instead of creating employee personas, designers may communicate user insights by sharing quotes, anecdotes, or examples from user interviews or usability testing sessions. One way to bring this to life is through a research safari where a variety of content is shared in a visual way that can be interrogated and explored.
Quantitative methods / solutions – Nashville-based consultant Pierre Delinois suggests it's important not to overlook quantitative methods / solutions as important design tools in favour of more visually appealing personas. Quantitative data frames the measurable outcomes a designer is seeking to drive and might include, for example, employee listening and engagement survey data, employee movement analysis and attrition analysis.
3. Evidence of innovation
Personas are a tool in the design process, not a final deliverable. However, increasingly they are positioned as a product and used as evidence of ‘doing design’ or ‘doing EX ’. While there may be a case for using personas in this way – for example for pushing the design agenda by making it more visible or accessible to non-designers – it is not without risk. Design research and innovation consultant Tyler Medina explains:
“Personas are a tool and not the deliverable. In the same way meetings aren’t the work, the work is the work. ”
Without knowledge, skills and (often) other design tools, employee personas have little worth and may in fact derail a design agenda. Pierre compares the idea of personas as a deliverable, to setting an annual objective of ‘holding a design sprint’*.
“It’s an empty objective. The question should always be: ‘What problem are we trying to solve?’ Then choose the tool to help you achieve that. Not starting with the tool. Design thinking is all about having a bias for action. When the persona becomes the outcome, you start to short circuit that intent.”
So is there ever a case for starting with personas?
Perhaps, Pierre reflects.
“There’s something to be said for it if that’s the foothold that gets your organisation to engage in the conversation and take a more employee-centric lens to people operations. But that should be a clear aspiration and the intention should be to go further and not just stop with a set of personas. Personas need to be the start of the journey, not the end.”
Laura Kunitz, a senior organisational development partner and EX expert, shared with me her experience of using personas as a way to change the focus and help drive change initiatives – specifically, to bring a variety of stakeholders along and make collaborative, human-centric design decisions based on viewing/projecting how different subsets may experience changes.
She explains:
“In a previous role, we were designing our return to office (RTO) following the pandemic. I heavily leveraged personas created from quantitative and qualitative survey data (specific RTO questions) to inform our cross-functional team and executives on how eight different subsets of employees would likely experience the change. The personas highlighted what was important to them, what wasn’t and what their change curve would likely look like.
“This allowed us to make more thoughtful decisions about how and where we invested in support and it also led us to change some of the priorities we had built into our change plan. Using personas in this way was a uniting tool that allowed us to move quickly and feel more confident in our approach (and know that the approach was supported broadly, not just in the context of HR).
“Now that I’m in my new role leading our change management and leadership practice, I’m continuing to build personas and empathy maps into our change toolkit to help drive a more human-centric design process across the enterprise. My plan is to use personas and empathy maps as a gateway exercise to help our HR team shift into a default of human-centric design.”
* What is a design sprint?
A design sprint is a structured process used by teams to solve problems and develop new ideas, typically in a short period of about five days. It was popularised by Jake Knapp and his team at Google Ventures (now GV) and outlined in detail in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.
4. Easy to create
Especially if you consider pen portraits as a persona (see post one for more), it’s easy to see why personas are considered simple and quick to create. Persona-type tools can be created in a workshop in an afternoon (one HR team did this as part of the people strategy development process). However, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Personas in whatever form, are a tool not a design outcome. It’s what you do with them that matters. Over reliance on hastily produced archetypes or pen portraits masquerading in the design process as rigorously researched and data-informed employee personas creates many risks. Similarly, employee personas that are not based on rigorous data, or that have outlived the data on which they were built, can create problems. Just some of those risks are listed below – these apply to personas in all their guises (design personas, archetypes and pen portraits).
Stereotyping: By categorising employees into broad personas based on demographic data or generalised characteristics, there's a danger of overlooking individual differences and unique experiences, thereby reinforcing stereotypes.
Mitigation: Validate your personas with a wide variety of people. Avoid using gender, names and images of people.
Inaccuracy: Employee personas are based on data and insights gathered from research, surveys and observations. If data used to create personas is incomplete, outdated or biased, personas will not accurately represent the diversity and complexity of the workforce.
Mitigation: Ensure good data analytics and management practices are observed as with any project using research data. Be clear on the intention behind your personas, who owns them and their intended lifespan. If you imagine they will be around for a while, build in a plan for ongoing validation and renewal.
Homogenization: In an attempt to create distinct personas, there's a risk of oversimplifying or homogenising employee characteristics within each persona category. This can lead to a lack of recognition and appreciation for the unique contributions and perspectives of individual employees within a persona group.
Mitigation: Be clear what level of data sits behind the personas. When designing specific solutions, be sure you are using personas that have the right level of data and insight.
Limited scope: Employee personas typically focus on observable characteristics such as demographics, behaviours and preferences. While these factors are important, they may not capture deeper psychological or emotional aspects of employee experience, such as motivations, values, or cultural background.
As Pierre remarks:
“The intention behind employee personas should be to spark curiosity and for designers or stakeholders more generally to ask more questions to better understand employee needs. The risk is that personas can be a replacement for curiosity. They become shorthand and people assume that is all they need to know about groups of employees when that is never the case.”
Mitigation: Service designer Laura Ewell, whose work has previously included the British Red Cross, agrees that personas are a useful way to spark curiosity when used intentionally. She explains: “One way I do this is to present a persona with a hypothetical situation and say ‘what would persona A do in this situation?’ I also include a ‘thinks, says, feels, does’ matrix to ensure we capture the psychology underlying the behaviour. Running a workshop with colleagues in EDI about personas, I found that using a ‘thinks, says, feels, does’ matrix brought up discussions about how we typically tend to focus on observable data and don’t dig deeper. It really bought the team into EX.”
Underestimating complexity: Workforce diversity extends beyond demographic characteristics to include factors such as cognitive styles, personality traits and life experiences. Employee personas may not fully capture the complexity of these dynamics, leading to oversimplified solutions that fail to address the nuanced needs of employees. Reflecting on the increasing popularity of a set of enterprise level personas, Catherine Henderson, an employee experience researcher from Mars, puts it: “When you think of a company of scale and diversity it’s impossible to capture that level of diversity and variance in eight employee personas or archetypes. Is that really a good way to think about people?”
Mitigation: When working with archetypes / enterprise level personas, be sure anyone using the tool is aware of their limitations. These tools should be the starting point, not the end point for design discussions.
Coming soon: See post 3 for more watch-outs about developing and using employee personas …(why lifespan and ownership matter)
