Why Generic Employee Personas Undermine Employee Engagement

Fast Facts About Employee Personas

• Employee personas are fictional profiles based on real workforce data that reflect common characteristics, attitudes, and needs, and help organizations communicate more effectively and personally with different employee segments.
• Generic personas fail to capture role-specific needs, communication habits, and engagement risks, leading to missed opportunities and decreased employee trust.
• Detailed personas built with HR data, surveys, and behavioral insights allow for tailored messaging, smarter channel choices, and measurable engagement improvements.
• Practical tips for using personas include understanding your audience, tailoring communication, selecting the right channels, measuring impact, and continuously refining your approach.
• Effective audience manager software brings employee personas to life with dynamic segmentation and omnichannel delivery, helping internal comms professionals connect with the right employees at the right time.

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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.

What are Employee Personas?

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:

• Replace one-size-fits-all internal comms
• Improve onboarding, engagement, and retention
• Understand deskless, hybrid, and remote workers with unique needs

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

From User Experience to Employee Experience: A Persona Journey

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. 

Components of Employee Personas

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

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.

Role and Organizational Context

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.

Psychographics and Motivations

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.

Communication Behaviors

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.

Engagement and Influence Metrics

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.

Types of Personas

In real-world organizations, employees fall into several different persona categories, depending on perspective. 

Ann Melinger identifies three types:  

1. Hard to reach: These personas are often deskless, remote, or overloaded. Typically, they miss messages due to limited access, shift schedules, or a lack of interest.
   Solution: Remove barriers
2. Hard to please: They are more engaged with communication, but often skeptical. They value transparency and personalization, and they tend to notice generic outreach immediately.
   Solution: Anticipate objections
3. Everyone else: This group doesn’t present obvious engagement risks but can drift without proactive communication. Consistency will usually keep them aligned.
   Solution: Be more inclusive

The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) suggests there are five types of employee personas:

1. Socializers who are outgoing and driven.
2. Taskers who tend to be quieter and more composed.
3. Builders who are warm, friendly, diplomatic, and emotionally intelligent.
4. Coasters who are recognized for being more pessimistic and prone to stress.
5. Achievers who have high energy, are obsessive, and sometimes distracted, tense, and moody.

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:

1. Highly mobile: Salespeople, account managers, systems engineers.
2. Campus mobile: Business development managers, executives, manufacturing, and logistics.
3. Remote/distance collaborator: Analysts, customer service and support, HR, legal, marketing, training, programs, and product managers.
4. Neighborhood collaborator: Engineers, finance staff, and many managers.
5. Workstation anchored: Administrative staff, software, and network engineers.  

In total contrast, AIHR reveals that Slack developed three personas based on a survey of 15,000 global office workers:

1. The Expressionist: Has a strong preference for less formal, visual communications.
2. The Road Warrior: Those who are always working from different locations at different times.
3. The Problem Solver: Doesn’t like repetitive tasks and has a work hack for everything.  

Example of a (Hard to Reach) Field Sales Persona

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.