The origins of employee personas

If you’ve worked in Marketing or Sales, you’ll know that companies use generalized portraits of consumers to improve the relevance of their communications.
 
Having a broad idea of who a customer is and what they are interested in can help brands to personalize the messages they send and the channels they use.
 
💡 If your audience is exclusively the over-70s, for example, you may not want to send your messages just on Snapchat or TikTok. That’s a generalization, but that’s what personas are, a shorthand way of engaging a greater number of people within a group. 💡
 
And it works too. Accenture found that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that offer more personalized experiences based on their particular needs and desires. 

A typical marketing persona may look like this.

Why use employee personas for multichannel communication?

One of the most important parts of creating a multichannel communication strategy for employees is deciding how you’re going to segment internal audiences.
 
One common way to do this is to consider the technologies that employees have access to. Take a look at this example.

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Multichannel communications: 
How to plan and execute a strategy

Your comms need to command attention and drive engagement in all kinds of different scenarios. Learn which channels are best for reaching different segments of your workforce.

The Employee Persona Checklist for Internal Communications

Whatever the future of internal communications holds, the days of relying solely on all-company emails and break-room posters are over.

To connect authentically with global, dispersed workforces, organizations must create personalized, multichannel experiences using a range of communication channels.

But how do you know which channels will be most effective?

Employee personas can help you create a multichannel communications strategy that employees find relevant and engaging.

This page has ideas on creating employee personas to upgrade your comms strategies. 

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Employee persona creation checklist

Let's get prepared

💡 50% of ABC Healthcare’s employees have access to a laptop and company email but 50% don’t.

This is a broad approach, and the company may not secure Mariella’s custom with these messages, but creating a portrait like this can help to outline the shared challenges and interests an audience has.

Today, personas aren’t just an external exercise. Your colleagues in talent acquisition and HR may already use them to get the best outcomes when recruiting, onboarding, and managing new hires.

Internal communicators can use them too. 

How would you handle this as the company comms specialist?

You might decide that you will make updates on ABC’s intranet and then – regardless of location, age, job role, or working habits – you’ll send notifications according to that technological split. 

So, 50% of people will receive emails and Teams messages pulling them to the intranet, while the other 50% will be targeted through a mix of digital signage, manager cascades, and mobile app notifications.

Alternatively, you may target people according to different geographic regions or the departments they work in. 

Or, if your organization has the resources, you may consider individual preferences and previous engagement. 

There is no single or “correct” answer, only what works best for your organization and its workforce. 

Over time, you’ll want to test and learn using a variety of different approaches, and employee personas are the best way to ensure you have access to a wide range of information so you can create different strategies based on general employee portraits. 

Now, let’s get personal.

1. Start with your goals

Before starting to gather information or create employee personas, it’s worth outlining some high-level objectives.

Fundamentally, you may be trying to improve the reach and relevancy of internal communications, but you can break this down further.

Considering these goals will help you understand who you want to target first and what questions you need to ask to get information that can help.

2. Do some research; talk to people 

Begin canvassing different employees and employee groups to learn more about them, their preferences, and needs.  

In addition to some basic demographic questions about their working locations, age groups, and educational backgrounds, a good persona will also focus on hobbies, interests, and attitudes to work. 

With all the relevant questions for your workforce in mind, you can approach employee groups in a variety of ways. The slides below capture some popular methods. 

3. Identify employee user journeys

You’re almost at the point of creating your employee personas, but this step can also be helpful.

Establishing what a day looks like for different users can be an important way of understanding what their challenges are and how they are currently working to overcome them.

The mix of qualitative and quantitative data you gathered in the previous steps should enable you to map out the average day for different groups. This can be a useful element in a detailed persona.

4. Create your employee personas 

Based on the size of your company, you may end up with 10 or more personas, but it’s best practice to start with between two and four.

If you’ve done your audience research, these should capture the main workflows that people are experiencing.

Format-wise, you will create a fictional persona based on a mix of demographic and psychographic data.

5. Create a multichannel comms strategy using personas

With several employee personas to consider, you can build up a picture of which communication channels may work best according to: 

• The content of the update 

• The person or group sending it (e.g., do employees want to receive emails from the CEO or would all-hands announcements work better?) 

• Different times and days

💡 Example

Your comms team has been sending out email invites for everyone to attend the company’s monthly all-hands meeting.

Despite regularly sending reminders, attendance is declining and the senior management team is unhappy.

How should communicators use personas to boost all-hands attendance engagement?

The information you gathered may reveal that emails are not seen as a priority channel for all audiences. Knowledge workers respond to Slack or Teams, while frontline staff pay more attention to mobile app alerts.

By using your employee personas to construct different communications pathways, you can test and learn, ultimately finding channels, times, and senders that work for different audiences.

6. Use your intranet to create persona groups

Historically, internal communications professionals have found it difficult to maintain and update large internal distribution lists for email because they often need to rely on IT colleagues or on automated integrations between email applications and human resources software.

Interact offers a better way to manage this, however, and it can reflect the same complexity as your employee persona templates.

Interact’s intranet personas feature allows intranet admins to build and easily manage lists of employee groups as varied as the workforce.

Whether you need to reach people based on location, training, role, or other factors, personas make it simple to change and create lists. And, because the system dynamically pulls user details directly from a source of master data, groups are kept relevant and up to date.

By combining clever planning with smart technologies, you can make your employee communications more personalized and engaging than ever.