A key part of improving the Employee Experience is understanding the different types of employees within your organisation, and ensuring those that you hire are a cultural fit – or even better – a cultural plus.
Our Employee Archetype Template allows you to build a representation of each different type of employee and build a better understanding of their hopes and aspirations, fears and concerns, needs and wants.
When looking to define or design employee journeys it is helpful to do this from the perspective of a single employee archetype to ensure that your Employee Experiences are as relevant as possible and personalised to the specific needs of each type of employee.
Many organisations create ‘Employee Personas’ and map the journey for each persona separately. Here’s why we use ‘Employee Archetypes’ instead.
Employee Archetypes versus Employee Personas
Personas are the norm in Customer Experience (CX) where you may not have a deep understanding of your customers, and any attempt at ‘humanising’ them is useful. However, you should already know a lot about your employees, and should strive to have a deeper understanding of their mindsets, their behaviours, their values, and their motivations. In our experience, personas typically don’t support efforts around Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, as fixed characters are created with a name and a face – e.g. Brian the Gas Engineer who is a white male, aged 45.
If we take the example of an organisation that has both head office workers and remote field workers, then it is important to identify these as different archetypes, as they will have different Employee Experiences and different objectives and challenges. If the field-based workers included, for example, care workers and maintenance engineers, then we would again represent these with different archetypes. In this case we might end up with: The carer, The fixer, The seller etc.. This may appear a little like an attempt to pigeonhole employees, but there are essential skills for each job role – imagine if a person who was motivated by caring for others was placed in a dog-eat-dog financial role, for example.
The idea of creating an archetype is to humanise different types of employees to help us better understand the audience we are looking to affect. After all, you do employ human beings!
Things to consider include:
- What are their goals, needs, and expectations?
- What are their challenges and frustrations?
- What are their values?
- What are their behaviours?
- What is their mindset?
- What are their motivations?
We can then use these archetypes to inform our other activities, such as journey mapping to achieve a level of detail that is not possible when we treat all employees as a single group, and Talent Attraction strategies. Archetypes allow us to personalise the Employee Experience to achieve the best possible results.
You can download our Employee Archetype template and other EX tools here.