Employee Persona

Employee Persona

 Author : Professor Nattapat Lopraditpong

          Employees are a vital stakeholder group that drives an organization towards achieving its vision, mission, and strategies. To foster employee engagement, dedication, and job satisfaction, as well as well-being, management and HR departments must deeply understand the needs and expectations of each employee group. Identifying factors that promote employee engagement is crucial for developing policies, benefits, and various aspects of HR management that truly foster engagement. Therefore, employee personas are vital tools used by management and HR departments to create a deeper understanding of target employee groups. These are idealized or fictional characters created through organizational research to represent target employee demographics. Creating personas helps to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of the experiences, needs, behaviors, and goals of these employee groups, ensuring alignment across all levels of management. Personas help organizations recognize that individuals have diverse needs and expectations, and they contribute to achieving the goal of creating positive experiences for target employee groups.

Benefits of Employee Persona

      1. Talent acquisition: Helps accurately define and find the target group of personnel (high-potential individuals) that the organization needs, rather than considering only academic performance, qualifications, educational institutions, etc.

      2. Learning and development: Assist in defining key competencies, skills, and knowledge, along with a development plan for target employee groups to enable them to grow and advance effectively, including guidelines for effective performance evaluation and management.

      3. Designing hybrid and remote work: Allow organizations to clearly understand the needs and expectations of their target employee groups, enabling them to design a work environment that fosters teamwork, creates a positive atmosphere, and encourages collaboration to produce high-quality work.

      4. HR Planning: This is important input data that helps in developing human resource strategies.

Steps in Developing an Employee Persona

Step 1: Define the target employee group, study objectives, and persona users.

Step 2: Collect data from the target employee group using various methods such as conversations, employee focus groups, or existing organizational research such as employee pulse surveys and exit or stay interviews.

Step 3: Analyze data and synthesize significant issues to identify the essential character traits of a persona. These can be analyzed and categorized by level, such as employees, managers, and senior executives, or by specific groups of interest, such as new employees or talent groups.

Step 4: Create Personas (multiple groups based on interests) by defining key information (template) such as target group or persona name, background, demographics (age, job title, level, department, and education), career goals and motivations, concerns, and expectations. The personas should be compiled to make them easily accessible to those who need them for designing and developing HR programs & policies.

Step 5: Verify, test, and implement, with the ability to review and repeat the process as needed.

Step 6: Put it into practice! Put it into practice! And put it into practice!

      Figure 1 Employee Persona Template

          From step 4, which involved defining the variables or key data to be summarized in the Persona, these variables can be adjusted as needed. Basic variables include demographics, skills/competencies/knowledge, career/life goals, educational background, work experience, personal attitudes/values, motivation, concerns/confusions, technology used, frequently used media/social media, regularly viewed content, etc.

Figure 2. Employee Persona Example (1)

Source: https://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas

รูปที่ 3 ตัวอย่าง Employee Persona (2)

Source: https://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas