Employee Personalization Groups Are Essential to Retention
Workers are the primary factor in any company’s success, regardless of the industry. Employees who are engaged and satisfied with their jobs can be more productive, contribute more to customer satisfaction and ultimately generate more profit. As a result, many companies are interested in decreasing turnover and increasing employee retention.
In addition to raising wages and offering more competitive employee benefits, your company might also increase retention by prioritizing the employee experience. However, every employee has different workplace challenges and needs. Some companies have countered this problem by sorting employees into persona groups. Also called “mass personalization,” this strategy can help you tailor messaging and support to individuals within a large and often distributed workforce.
How to Create Employee Persona Groups
Employee personalization takes inspiration from common marketing strategies that aim to understand a customer base by dividing it based on shared characteristics. Although employees are different from customers, you can divide them into persona groups using similar criteria:
- Demographics: Considering demographics like age and gender allows you to address retention problems specific to these groups. Although you shouldn’t rely on demographics alone, they can add dimension to your persona groups.
- Career progression: An employee who has received multiple promotions within your company has a very different experience than someone who has just been hired or someone who has diligently worked in the same position for decades. Each of these employees has different frustrations, so it makes sense to communicate with them differently.
- Career goals: If you know certain employees have ambitious career goals, you will need to nurture those ambitions if you hope to retain them. You can gather information about employees’ career goals during onboarding and group them based on response.
- Workplace challenges: Many workplace events affect employee experience and retention. The termination of a manager or the merging of two teams, for example, can create challenges for certain workers. Addressing affected employees as a group allows you to keep them engaged and address their concerns without involving the whole company.
To make the most of your employee persona groups, collect both quantitative and qualitative data, conduct complementary market research and consider using data analytics to identify employees with shared characteristics efficiently. After you have divided your workforce into personalization groups, you can tailor information about company changes to minimize the risk of turnover in each group. You can also come up with special initiatives to support and retain certain groups, if necessary.
The Benefits of Employee Personalization
The goal of employee persona groups is to drive employee engagement and keep good workers on your staff longer. Personalization can make employees feel better appreciated and more heard, especially when you take information from regular surveys. Some other benefits include:
- Increased understanding of how employees experience your workplace
- The ability to implement policies and technologies gradually, group by group
- Stronger evidence to present to leadership when proposing solutions for specific groups
Get More Industry Insights From Global Electronic Services
Employee retention can prove challenging in the manufacturing industry, but employee persona groups can help your company give employees the personal attention they need to succeed.
To learn more about workforce trends in manufacturing, subscribe to our blog today. At Global Electronic Services, we repair industrial electronics for some of the largest and most advanced manufacturers in the world.
