What are Employee Archetypes?

2 Minutes
Understanding different needs, wants and pains

Where you have different types of employees that are likely to have a different experience, then it is important to understand their different needs, wants and pains. Many organisations create ‘Employee Personas’ and map the journey for each persona separately.

Instead of using these, however, we use ‘Employee Archetypes’, and we’ll explain why.

Personas are fine in Customer Experience (CX) where you may not have a deep understanding of your customers, and any attempt at ‘humanising’ them is useful. 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 diversity and inclusion and empathy, 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..

 

 

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. 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?

After all, it’s about the people, stupid! 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. Archetypes allow us to personalise the Employee Experience to achieve the best possible results.

Do get in touch with us if you’d like to know more about how to define Employee Archetypes. 

For more on Employee Experience frameworks, view this page.

Related Insights

What are the characteristics of organisations with strong and effective cultures?

A robust and effective organisational culture is frequently the cornerstone of high-performing entities, exerting a significant influence on a myriad of organisational dimensions, from employee morale to overarching business results.
3 Minutes

Employee Experience Opportunity survey 2020

Working with the Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC) we ran the 2020 Employee Experience Opportunity (EXO) survey.

What is an Employee Experience survey?

Helping you to understand how your employees are feeling about working life at your organisation
2 Minutes

Employee Experience industry useful reports – December 2023

Here’s links to recent reports we’ve come across that we’ve found interesting and some of our key takeaways from them.
3 Minutes 12/12/2023

Would you like to speak to one of our experts?