Tydy Up: The art of creating employee personas

Hello there!

If your employee personas look anything like this…

It's a recipe for disaster.

Know why?

Because you just clubbed King Charles and The Prince of Darkness - Ozzy Osbourne under the same persona!

Now imagine designing an Employee Experience program using this data. One that’ll serve both the rockstar and the monarch. Chances are it just won’t work very well.

So, that brings us to our question. What do good employee personas look like?

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Some good employee personas

? Let’s start with 星巴克 .

?Starbucks created three employee personas and built three different tracks of EX strategies for each of these personas.

1. Careerists: Those who are focused on long-term career advancement
2. Artistes: Those who want to work for a community-oriented, socially responsible organization
3. Skiers: Those who are working to support other passions

Even in one glance, you can see that the preferences, motivations and potential problems for all three of these personas would be different.

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?? Then there’s 3M.

3M recognized eight employee personas among its 85000+ workforce, back in 2009. Four of them are:

1. "In it for my life": Those motivated by alternative work arrangements. Similar to Skiers from the Starbucks’ personas.
2. "In it to win it”: Those motivated by a fast-paced, highly challenging, risk-taking environment.
3. "In it to experience it”: Those motivated by developmental stretch assignments.
4. "In it as Alpine ascenders": Those motivated by rapid, regular promotions.

?? Lastly, Cisco.

Cisco applied the new world order to identify five personas. This one is especially interesting for the hybrid work world.

1. Highly mobile: salespeople, account managers, systems engineers
2. Campus mobile: business development managers, executives, manufacturing, and logistics
3. Remote/distance collaborator: Analysts, customer service and support, HR, legal, marketing, training, program and product managers
4. Neighborhood collaborator: engineers, finance staff, and many managers
5. Workstation anchored: administrative staff, software and network engineers

Okay, so, creating employee personas is a big task. But the good part is, once you have your personas detailed out, it becomes so much easier to design your employee experience strategy.

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In our latest persona-led Employee Experience strategy guide, we did a deep dive into the 4-step framework to build personas and EX strategies. It is simple, easy to follow, and a great place to start. Plus, it includes a free employee persona template like the one below ??

Free Template: Start creating your employee personas

Four mistakes to avoid while building employee personas

1. Demographic vs. psychographic data - what is more reliable?

Demographics is, of course, the easiest piece of data to get your hands on. But as Emma Bridger explains, depending only on details like age, gender, ethnicity, income level, and marital status to create personas can lead to poor assumptions and stereotypes. You don’t want that!

For instance, assuming that all women will want more work-life balance opportunities than other genders. Or, that younger employees have a lot more free time to dedicate to work could be some of the many biases that could be born out of relying only on demographic data.

Instead, add on psychographic data to build more nuanced and accurate personas. It provides insights into people's attitudes, beliefs, values, interests, hobbies, lifestyle choices, and motivations.?

While demographics tell you “who” an employee is, psychographics help you understand the "why" behind employee behaviors and preferences.

2. Trusting your “feelings” over “data”

?We aren’t against gut feelings or intuition. But even if that’s what you want to go with, use data to validate your decision for everyone else’s benefit. And we get it - you’ve probably been working with these employees for years now and know what could probably be the personas already.

But going by your assumptions especially when you have access to data may not be the wise thing to do.?Your personal biases and subjective opinions can often play up unconsciously, and sometimes, in damaging ways.?

Plus, using data - that’s the best way to get company-wide alignment, and scaling your EX strategy.?

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3. Too many personas

It can be very tempting to create so many different personas to account for the tiny differences that naturally make up any population. But as we saw with the 3M example, 5-10 personas are usually plenty.

So if you find yourself struggling to limit yourself or identify what could be the 5-10 personas to look at, start at the business side of things.?

Like, Dr. Janel Field says, think of one initiative in your organization. It could be a learning program or a new lateral movement opportunity. Then work backwards to see what types of personas would benefit from such an initiative and identify those within your organization.

4. Adopting generic personas

There are a bunch of generic employee personas floating around on the internet. The achievers, the traditionalists, the caregivers, and so on and so forth. While that may be a great place to understand the diversity of personas, those may not be relevant to your business. The real gold lies in your internal data. That’s where you should begin. Your feedback data, exit interview data, focus group data, event, performance, and demographics data. Use this to create authentic personas - not some fake, non-existent persona manufactured by the internet.

And finally, we can help!

Building employee personas can take time and needs quite a bit of data scientist-like skills. And scaling that effort manually can be tough. That’s when Tydy can help.?

Tydy connects data from multiple apps and platforms within your organization to create a unified profile of each employee. Yup, even if that’s 50 or 50000 employees. You can then use that level of understanding to segment and create employee personas.?

Not a bad place to start when designing your EX strategy huh?

?? Read our newest Case Study: How Cipla created personalized employee onboarding experiences for its new hires at scale

?? On EX: Four powerful ways to utilize data & automation to improve the employee experience

????EXtra! EXtra! Podcast: Catch EX experts Leslie Rogers and Emma Bridger share some real-world tips on getting more leadership buy-in for EX

?? Design thinking for employee experience - by 美国麻省理工学院 - 斯隆管理学院

?? Should algorithms make layoff decisions? - by SHRM

?? Should leaders disclose their chronic illness in the workplace? - by HBR

?? what you've read in this edition of Tydy Up?

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See you next month with more on EX!

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback - on the newsletter, the EX Guide, and the persona template. Here’s where you can find me: [email protected].?