Despite your best efforts, some employees remain hard to reach, and their numbers are growing. Whether it’s your sales team, truck drivers, production workers, front-line staff or those adapting to a hybrid work environment, you can’t rely on the tried-and-true channels to connect the same way — or at all — with everyone.

The solution is to meet these employees where they live: on the channels they can easily access, at a time that works for them, and with the content they need.

How, you ask? In our communications assessments, we’ve added a new tool: employee personas.

To get started, tell me about your communications to begin developing your personas. Here are the questions communicators ask us about this measurement technique:

What is an employee persona?
It’s a representation of a group of employees with similar traits, experiences and behaviors, based on data and insights gathered in our research. We create a narrative around these employees to bring that information to life. That information helps you target these groups with new or adapted channels to increase their engagement.
How do you determine the persona groups?
We review your various employee types (hourly, non-desk, remote, hybrid, people leaders, night shift, sales, nurses, physicians, warehouse workers.) We then prioritize the groups with the lowest engagement with communications—your hardest to reach audiences.
How do you monitor their communications during the day?
Through virtual and/or in-person shadowing and check-ins.
What are you looking to record?
We look for things such as when they receive or review communications, what tools they use to communicate, what type of information seems to matter most to them, what information they consider valuable. We track a person’s typical day to determine the best times to communicate.
How long does it take on average?
We recommend defining no more than six personas — the process takes about six weeks.
What’s the result?
You’ll get a detailed persona for each employee group similar to this sample.
Why should I do this?
Personas have long been used in marketing to target customers. Personas are a way to treat employees more personally. Employees want communications tailored to them and your competitors may already be doing it. Can you afford not to?

Are you interested in producing your own employee personas? Let me know.

Talk soon,
Kristin Hart
Ragan Consulting Group
312-900-0204