Shaping up Employee Personas have become a popular tool for organizations to provide more personalized and bespoke experiences for their employees.
We have highlighted all you need to understand about employee personas in this article to provide you with the competencies needed to use employee personas in your workplace – and drive business growth through greater productivity, retention, and engagement.
What is an Employee Persona?
An Employee Persona is a semi-fictional representation of a group of your workforce who share similar characteristics, experiences, and behaviors. Employee personas are built on the information and insights you have about the people that make up your teams. An Employee Persona is a detailed profile of a certain employee segment that includes information about their qualities, attitudes, desires, and needs. Human resource departments can utilize these profiles to more effectively personalize and customize their initiatives to their employees’ needs.
Personas are a tool that has been used in marketing for years and, more lately, in customer experience programs to analyze the moments that matter for specific consumer cohorts. They are also becoming increasingly widespread in HR, as firms see the importance of providing more personalized, customized experiences to their workers; brought together within Employee Experience Programs.
Employee personas are a good method to create a narrative around distinct groups within the workforce, allowing HR teams to get connected to their employees and design experiences that are personalized to their requirements. Besides, Employee Personas can be integrated into any existing HR Tool. In example: Have a fresh look after your Pulse Survey outcome by looking after the outcome and results per persona instead of departments and job titles.
Improve Business Performance by shaping up Employee Personas
To create outstanding Employee Experiences, it’s critical to understand your Employees’ ideas, concerns, needs, and viewpoints. It is critical, therefore, that you get a thorough grasp of them, which is where Employee Personas step in.
Following that, no two people are completely identical and employees may fit in more Employee Personas than one. Consider your own squad: How many of your colleagues share similar (career) aspirations, organizational expectations, and/or behavior?
Extend it to the entire organization, and it becomes readily apparent how much variation exists throughout the workforce. By the way, this is a positive thing because diversity is necessary for innovation!
The foundation for enhancing Employee Experience
The foundation for enhancing the employee experience is employee knowledge and appreciation.
Understanding their perspectives and issues, as well as their ambitions and desires, as well as their objectives, and then developing employee solutions based on that understanding, is critical for an engaged, productive, and loyal workforce. However, workforces are not homogeneous. Demographics, educational background, language, and skill sets all contribute to a multigenerational, diverse collection of employees, frequently with as many differing perspectives and outlooks as the total population. In these situations, appropriately created employee personas can not only facilitate the delivery of more effective, efficient, and cost-effective employee solutions, but also provide a focused, empathic approach to improving the employee experience.
Organizations that can customize their experiences for employees will have a lot greater chance of creating engagement, since they will resonate with and appeal to a much bigger group than a broad-brush approach. Of course, tailoring each experience to each employee is difficult. Shaping up Employee Personas for your organization enables you to develop experiences for smaller numbers of unique employee types, making it far more efficient and cost-effective to create highly personalized experiences that are likely to connect with employees.
Having your employee personas in hand, you also can conduct employee journey mapping activities for each to begin identifying the critical moments for various groups, providing you with a roadmap of improvements and measures to boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention.
Steps to take after you have shaped up Employee Personas for your organization
First of all, well done! Now that you’ve created a collection of employee personas, it’s essential to use them to strengthen the Employee Experience – and the first step is to map Employee Journeys.
Journey mapping is a strategy that breaks down the complete employee journey into distinct moments, allowing you to pinpoint the critical points at which you may intervene to enhance the experience. After you’ve completed your path mapping process, you can begin designing feedback programs to collect feedback at critical periods and begin surfacing ideas into how to enhance the experience for each group.
By implementing feedback systems at these points, aimed at the employees who matter most (as determined by your personas and the demographic data you acquired), you may begin to gain a better knowledge of the steps necessary to improve the experience. This strategy enables you to personalize the experience by getting to know your employees on a personal level and determining the activities that will have the most effect on engagement, productivity, retention, and, of course, revenue.
Employee Journey Mapping with Employee Personas
Now it’s time to identify stages that matter to each Employee Persona; the so called steps in the Employee Journey.
Then, define the various stages of employment at your firm and the anticipated results for each step. Recruiting, hiring, onboarding, wages and benefits, continuous engagement, volunteer activities, training and development, progression, performance management, and awards are just a few examples of topics to consider.
After that, create a storyboard or map. Visualize the trip from the perspective of the employees. Include data from Employee Turnover, Employee Surveys, Offboarding and other interactions about goals and expectations. Outline the company’s processes and touch points at each level, noting any issues, such as ineffective onboarding, ineffective performance review systems, or a lack of career advancement opportunities. Analyze the transitions among stages and identify spots along the trip where an employee may feel disoriented or disinterested.
Lastly, consider taking action. Eliminate roadblocks along the Employee’s Journey. For instance, is the onboarding procedure very complicated? Are performance reviews conducted on a timely and frequent basis? Include potential solutions such as a standardized on boarding process and management training on how to conduct effective performance reviews. Additionally, offering career development programs or enhancing internal communications efforts to keep employees informed of business decisions and changes to the employee experience journey map supports your organization to operate at it’s best! 🎉
