Generic employee personas don’t work. Learn why and how detailed, data-driven personas can improve engagement, personalization, and communication strategies.
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In today’s ever-evolving workplace, employee engagement is vital but increasingly difficult to sustain. Many organizations struggle to connect with employees in a meaningful way. One major reason is that they treat their workforce as a single, uniform group, rather than recognizing employees as individuals with distinct roles, needs, and motivations.
Global research shows this is not an isolated problem. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, only 21% of employees globally feel engaged at work. Meanwhile, disengagement is costing the global economy an estimated US$438 billion annually in lost productivity. These numbers point to a fundamental breakdown in how organizations understand and communicate with their people.
Exploring decreased employee engagement and increased resignations, the CEO of Brilliant Ink (bink.), Ann Melinger advises organizations to understand the employee experience they offer before they implement new engagement initiatives. “Consider gathering insights directly from your employees,” she says.
“When you address fundamental needs first, your engagement strategy goes beyond tactics. That strategy becomes part of a comprehensive approach to building a culture where employees feel valued, connected, and motivated to contribute to your mission of improving patient lives.”
Ann Melinger
Employee personas provide a strategic solution, enabling organizations to personalize messages, choose the most effective channels, and foster connections across diverse employee groups. Those who believe in personas say it’s key to understanding your workforce. Ann Melonger believes it’s typically a missing ingredient in employee communication plans.
But there is a caveat. Not all personas are created equal. When they’re too broad or based on outdated assumptions, personas can miss the mark or worse, disengage the very people they’re meant to support.
We’re going to explore what makes employee personas effective, where generic approaches fall short, and how to build personas that actually move the needle on employee engagement.
Employee personas are fictional, research-based profiles that represent different segments of a workforce based on factors like job role, experience, age, or work style. Much like customer personas in marketing, they reflect shared characteristics, goals, challenges, and communication preferences among groups of employees. These personas help internal communicators, HR professionals, and leaders craft more relevant, resonant messages that foster engagement.
"Persona is a fictional character based on real data, designed to represent a larger audience that may think or act in a similar way.”
Brilliant Ink Persona Presentation
Ultimately, employee personas are a tool for internal comms that inform decisions related to talent acquisition, training, communication, and overall employee experience. They also enable organizations to create and deliver the right message, to the right people, in the right way, strengthening connection, clarity, and trust across the organization.
Employee personas:
Here's the issue: Many organizations rely on generic, overly broad employee personas that fail to reflect the real diversity of employee experiences. This one-size-fits-all approach risks alienating the very people you're trying to reach — especially in large, hybrid, or deskless workforces.
“Here's how I sum up the power of using personas: By trying to connect with EVERYONE, you run the risk of not connecting with ANYONE. To fully resonate and drive behavior change, communications must be created with a certain SOMEONE in mind.”
Ann Melinger
Personas are nothing new. First came user personas, with employee personas evolving over time.
In the 1990s, the Danish researcher and Ph.D in human-computer interaction, Lene Nielsen, formalized the concept of user personas in design and product development with a focus on user experience (UX). Since then, she has written at least 80 papers and two published books on personas.
Her focus was on goals, behaviors, and pain points related to product use. But soon marketers started using personas to target external audiences. By the mid-2010s, as organizations focused more on employee experience (EX) and internal brand alignment, some forward-thinking HR and internal comms teams started using persona techniques. Additionally, reports and companies, including Gartner, the American research and advisory firm, began to recommend employee personas as a strategic EX tool. They highlighted that it was especially useful for designing onboarding, employee training, and company culture initiatives.
Gartner also highlights customer personas, B2B buyer personas, enterprise personas, and more, showing the importance of personas across the board.
More recently, in Employees as customers, Deloitte uses personas to reimagine the employee experience in government.
Today, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) utilizes personas as part of their consulting approach, particularly in areas like customer experience and people strategy.
Since 2020, with the rise of remote and hybrid work, personalization has become essential. As a result, an increasing number of tools, including Cerkl Broadcast, integrate persona-based segmentation into their platforms. By understanding the needs of different employee segments, organizations can tailor their initiatives to be more relevant and effective.
Effective employee personas are built on a combination of qualitative and quantitative insights. They include more than just job titles. Instead, they humanize people by highlighting what matters to them.
Core demographics include basic information such as age range, tenure, location, education level, and employment type (remote, in-office, frontline, and so on). These details provide foundational context, especially when paired with other data.
This captures the employee’s function, level of responsibility, department, and work environment. It stands to reason that a persona for a regional manager will differ dramatically from a field technician, even if they’re in the same business unit.
This component enables us to understand what drives each persona. It includes their values, attitudes, goals, and what they find rewarding at work. For example, are they mission-driven? Do they value work-life balance or advancement? This will influence how you speak to them.
Pulse surveys will provide the answers to these questions: Do employees check their email daily? Do they prefer Slack to the intranet and/or avoid town halls? Communication behaviors highlight how each group consumes (or ignores) messages, all of which is vital for choosing the right employee engagement approach.
Strong personas include data on engagement levels and influence. Are they highly engaged or at risk of attrition? Do they lead teams, mentor others, or influence workplace culture? Knowing this helps prioritize outreach and understand ripple effects across the organization.
In real-world organizations, employees fall into several different persona categories, depending on perspective.
Ann Melinger identifies three types:
The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) suggests there are five types of employee personas:
Of course, when you create your employee personas, there is considerable benefit in customizing them to ensure they are meaningful. AIHR shares how Cisco identified five employee personas when redesigning workspaces:
In total contrast, AIHR reveals that Slack developed three personas based on a survey of 15,000 global office workers:
Ann Melinger presented Let’s Get Personal! Getting Personal with Employee Personas during ALI’s 11th Annual Strategic Internal Communications Conference in Boston last year. This included a short example of a “Hard to Reach” field salesperson:
She called her Elain.
It is often challenging to communicate with this persona because of location, schedule, and work environment. Elain is in field sales and works remotely on the west coast, which is three hours behind HQ. She is 36 years old and extremely reliant on remote technology.
It appears that she is always on the road. She probably doesn't have a company laptop and rarely checks email. As a result, most messages miss her, especially when announcements are buried in long intranet updates. If messages aren’t about revenue, comp, or the supply chain, she identifies them as low priority. The survey feedback indicates that HQ simply “doesn’t get it.”
So, what can the company do about “hard to reach” personas like Elain?
To engage these types of employee personas, communication must be mobile-first, concise, and timed for downtime between client meetings and travel. Push notifications via mobile or WhatsApp, short weekly digests, and team-based leader comms work better than static PDFs or desktop-heavy formats.
Embrace journey mapping and transform employee satisfaction and engagement into a data-driven strategy.
Creating detailed employee personas can’t be done by simply ticking a box. It needs to be a strategic move that can transform how your organization communicates and connects. When done right, personas become the foundation for more personalized, relevant, and effective employee experiences across the board.
Personalization isn’t just a marketing tactic; it’s a growing expectation in the workplace. Employees want communication, development, and recognition that feel relevant to their roles and experiences. When messages are generic or disconnected from daily realities, employees are more likely to tune out or disengage. As hybrid work expands and organizational complexity grows, tailoring the employee experience is no longer optional. Rather, it’s essential for building trust and sustaining engagement.
Employee personas help cut through noise by aligning content with what matters to each group. This increases message recall and improves trust. Messages that "sound like they’re for me" typically get read, understood, and acted on.
Gallup’s 2025 research shows that only 21% of employees globally feel engaged, and U.S. engagement is at its lowest level in a decade. Disengaged employees are not just unproductive, they’re also more likely to miss work, resist change, and eventually leave. With 70% of team engagement tied directly to the manager’s engagement, the ripple effects are significant. Creating targeted, relevant communication based on real employee needs is one of the most effective ways to lift engagement — especially when trust and connection are in short supply.
Knowing which employee personas prefer mobile over email or peer-led discussions over executive videos allows you to shift away from a blanket approach. Personas power smarter multichannel strategies with higher ROI.
When employee personas are tied to measurable behaviors (opens, clicks, sentiment shifts), you can fine-tune communication strategies in real time. Over time, this leads to stronger engagement and better business outcomes.
One of the main criticisms of personas is that they can sometimes oversimplify the complexity of real people. When you distill a diverse audience to a handful of representative profiles, you risk creating stereotypes rather than capturing the full range of behaviours and motivations.
Jodie Shaw, Head of Global Marketing at Kadence International, is a fan of personas (particularly for marketing), but recognizes both their drawbacks as well as their value. While many people maintain personas are outdated, she maintains that, used correctly, they can provide valuable insights. Admitting they do have limitations, “they can still be a powerful tool when used correctly.”
One of the benefits she highlights relates to consistent messaging across different communication channels.
“When everyone on your team shares the same clear picture of the target audience, it’s much easier to stay on the same page, whether you’re creating a social media post, an email campaign, or a new product description. This consistency helps build trust and brand recognition, making your marketing efforts more cohesive and effective.”
Jodie Shaw
Drawbacks include oversimplification, inflexibility, a lack of data-driven insights, and the fact that “creating and maintaining accurate personas can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.”
Ultimately, she believes that a balanced approach works best. Using personas alongside other insights-driven methods helps marketers ground their strategies in real understanding and stay adaptable. While not a cure-all, thoughtfully applied personas can be key to campaigns that truly resonate.
As indicated in the bink. Let’s Get Personal presentation, to create rich, actionable personas, you need to gather and analyze a variety of data points.
Employee personas identify essential data sources, including:
The goal is to configure this data into human-centered profiles. Personas shouldn’t be rigid documents. They should evolve with your people.
Embrace journey mapping and transform employee satisfaction and engagement into a data-driven strategy.
Creating employee personas is only the first step. The real impact comes from how you apply them. When used strategically, personas can help you craft messages that resonate, choose the right delivery channels, and build stronger relationships across your workforce.
These tips will help you put your personas into action and drive meaningful engagement:
Dig beneath job titles and departments. Use real data to uncover what different employee groups care about, struggle with, and respond to.
Don’t send the same message to everyone. Customize tone, length, channel, and timing based on employee persona needs.
Use employee persona insights to meet employees where they are — whether they are mobile alerts for frontline workers or Slack threads for tech teams.
Track engagement via employee persona groups. Which messages get traction? Which don’t? Use this insight to optimize future communication.
Share personas internally to help leaders and managers understand different employee perspectives. This fosters inclusive communication and decision-making.
Employee personas are living documents. Update them regularly with new insights from surveys, analytics, and employee feedback loops.
Cerkl Broadcast’s Audience Manager allows you to bring your employee personas to life and keep them relevant over time. For example:
You can automatically segment your audience based on behaviors, roles, preferences, and more. No manual updates are needed. Instead, dynamic segments ensure your employee personas reflect real-time data.
Send personalized content to each persona group through their preferred channels, including email, intranet, mobile, or Slack, without duplicating effort.
By combining AI-powered personalization and behavior-based targeting, Broadcast transforms static employee personas into actionable audience strategies.
Now that you understand how personas drive communication success, the next step is to embed them into your employee journey mapping.
We invite you to use our free Employee Experience Journey Mapping Template to chart key moments, pain points, and communication opportunities for each employee persona. From onboarding to career growth to exit, mapping with personas ensures a more intentional, connected employee experience.
Embrace journey mapping and transform employee satisfaction and engagement into a data-driven strategy.
What does workplace persona mean? A workplace persona is a semi-fictional profile based on employee data and behavior that helps organizations understand and segment their internal audiences for more effective communication and engagement.
What are the main types of employee personas? Three common employee personas include: Hard to Reach (often offline or mobile-first), Hard to Please (high expectations, prefer transparency), and Everyone Else (the silent majority who benefit from consistent, relevant engagement). However, there are many other examples.
How to build employee personas? To create employee personas, gather data from HR systems, surveys, communication metrics, and employee feedback. Combine this into distinct profiles that reflect key characteristics, preferences, and communication habits — and keep them updated regularly.
Embrace journey mapping and transform employee satisfaction and engagement into a data-driven strategy.
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