How Well Do You Know

Your Workforce?
Why Personas and Profiles are Critical to
Space Planning & Technology Adoption
Eric Krapf

www.workspace-connect.com
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Executive Summary
The workspace of the future is all about flexibility. Enterprises need to be able to offer
collaboration technology and office environments that permit employees to fulfill their
different roles as they go through their workdays. But to provide the right options in
the right proportions, enterprises must understand who their employees are and what
exactly they do all day. Using employee personas can serve as a starting point
towards getting a handle on this information.

Personas are fictionalized representations of

BUILDING PERSONAS
Here are some resources for
best practices in building
personas:
“Perfecting Your Personas,”
Kim Goodwin, author of
“Designing for the Digital Age,”
Cooper blog
“Getting From Research to
Personas: Harnessing the
Power of Data,” Kim Goodwin,
Cooper blog
different types of customers or, as in our case here,
employees. The concept’s creation is generally
credited to Alan Cooper, a software designer who
devised it as a way of understanding who would be
using the products he built, and thus how he should
build the products. Though Cooper created
personas as a way of understanding customers,
many enterprise HR organizations have applied the
concept to their employee bases as a way to better
serve their workers.

“Your Guide to Successful Personas help you understand who your

Persona Building,” Lex Joosten,
Editor of Ignation, Medium
“Why Personas Fail,” Kim
Flaherty, User Experience
Specialist with Nielsen Norman
Group, Nielsen Norman Group
blog
“Creating and Understanding
Employee Personas to Drive
Productivity in the Workplace,”
Natalia Jain, Research
Executive, B2B International
enterprise’s employees are; however, enterprise
decision-makers also need to know what these
folks are doing all day. So thinking of these
individuals, and how they use technology and
workspaces, in terms of “roles” or “user profiles”
may also be useful. These may be as simple as a
listing of job titles, with a description of the
collaboration needs associated with each title. Such
a description should take into account not only the
specific technologies required for role, but also
desired features of a work environment.

This whitepaper will briefly discuss different types of personas, then describe how
enterprise decision-makers can look at the broader concept of roles or user profiles
to get specific in matching employees’ needs with the technologies and spaces that
best fulfill them.

How Well Do You Know Your Workforce? • www.workspace-connect.com

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Building Personas: Personality Types

One way to create a taxonomy of employee types is by characterizing those
workers—or having them characterize themselves—by traits or personality types. As
you can imagine, there are many different approaches to this. The consulting firm
Infosys characterizes workers by seven descriptive personas: Achiever, Adventurer,
Apostle, Perfectionist, Networker, Driver, Unifier. Similarly, the consultancy Deloitte
builds its concept of personas, especially as related to individuals’ collaboration
styles, around a framework it calls Business Chemistry.

Whatever framework you choose, the next step is to relate personas to the
requirements they present for collaboration technology and workspaces. As one
example, in recent research, Microsoft identified four workplace personas, and in
describing these personas, related each one to its needs in terms of technology and
other workplace factors. You can view the four personas—Connected Builder,
Autonomous Problem Solver, Creative Connector, Independent Ally--and related
technology needs here; more pertinent to this paper are the broader conclusions
Microsoft drew about employee preferences:

• Most employees find teamwork great for motivation and inspiration, but they also value
the quiet and focus that can come from working alone
o 68% of employees surveyed said they’re most motivated when working within a
team; 71% said they’re most inspired when working as part of a team
o But 50% said they’re most productive when working alone; only one fifth are at
their most productive when in the office surrounded by people, and only 18%
said they’re most focused in the office surrounded by people
• Distractions are a significant challenge for nearly all types of workers
o Almost half (46%) said they’re distracted by people around them talking and 42%
said they’re distracted by chatting with colleagues either in person or virtually
through text or instant messaging
o 47% said they’re most productive in a quiet part of the office away from other
people, and a further 18% said they’re most productive at home—for a total of
65% saying they’re most productive when working at home or in a quiet part of
the office

The bottom line? While personas help give decision-makers a nuanced

understanding of the workforce they’re serving, the fundamental elements of the
workspace experience—and how employees react to these elements—cut across
different personas and tend to confirm that workspaces and technology must support
a mix of interaction and solitude for workers to be both creative and productive..

Beyond Personas: Roles and User Profiles

Another way to view the employees you serve is by looking at the roles they perform,
and ensuring that you provide them with the right technology tools and workplace
environment for accomplishing those tasks. Marty Parker, principal consultant at
UniComm Consulting, divides enterprise job roles into nine categories that cut

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across all vertical industries, and has developed a User Profile for each role. Each
User Profile describes the type of work that a person in this role performs, and the
technology tools most often required. The nine Usage Profiles are:

* Collaboration * Retail * Administration

* Field * Information Processing * Management
* Contact Center * Production * Foundational

When Parker engages with an enterprise that needs to update its collaboration
technology, he starts by conducting extensive interviews with employees, across
departments, about what they need to do their jobs and how they work. These in-
depth conversations are important, as Usage Profiles don’t typically break down
cleanly along departmental lines, Parker said. Rather, “you get these little worlds of
specialty workflows” that each require their own approach to collaboration technology
tools. It’s at that point that, “you see the patterns coming out.”

You might think this would lead to a plethora of different technology systems, all
running independently of one another—a situation that clearly wouldn’t be optimal.
And, in fact, many enterprises have at least some variation of this situation already,
thanks to “shadow IT,” a situation which has employees bringing technology from
their consumer/personal worlds into the office because they find it best fits their
needs.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Once the USAGE PROFILES SERIES
enterprise has a comprehensive understanding of
• A Guide to Effective and
how its various types of workers use collaboration Economical UC Solutions
technology, it can come up with a menu of products • The Collaboration Usage
and services that IT can offer across departments Profile
via a service catalog. IT, working with the • The Field Usage Profile
departments and business units, can determine • The Contact Center Usage
Profile
which users get access to which offerings. These • The Retail Usage Profile
parameters are determined based on the • The Information Processing
understanding that “some parts of my organization Usage Profile
are better served by Platform A, and other parts • The Production Usage
Profile
with Platform B,” Parker said. • The Administration Usage
Profile
Besides giving the enterprise a way to deliver the • The Management Usage
right capabilities to the right people, this approach Profile
• The Foundational Usage
also lets IT be more efficient in purchasing—and Profile
releasing—collaboration licenses that might have
been overdeployed.

If this all still seems like too complex a task to manage, Parker said he believes most
enterprises will increasingly find help via robotic process automation (RPA)
systems. RPA can provide a simple interface to the technology tools designated for
each role. For example, a particular User Profile may require access to Microsoft

How Well Do You Know Your Workforce? • www.workspace-connect.com

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Outlook with Teams for persistent chat, as well as a company-provided cellular-

phone account. An RPA-enabled system could reference the pre-defined, role-based
profile and automatically configure the various required accounts, alleviating the need
for administrators to handle each task in piecemeal fashion.

Conclusion
To make sure that your enterprise’s investments in collaboration technology and
workspaces pay off, you have to understand the people on whose behalves you’re
making these choices. That means knowing what they prefer as individuals, as well
as understanding what tools and spaces will best help them do their jobs. Creating
personas and user profiles can help your enterprise gain this understanding when
you’re preparing to make significant investments in these areas.

Eric Krapf is General Manager and Program Co-Chair of WorkSpace Connect, the
conference for decision-makers responsible for making investments in collaboration
workspaces and technologies. WorkSpace Connect takes place Sept. 9-11, 2019 at
the Westin Galleria hotel in Dallas, TX. He also serves as GM and Program Co-Chair
for Enterprise Connect, which for 30 years has been the leading independent
conference for communications and collaboration technologies.

How Well Do You Know Your Workforce? • www.workspace-connect.com

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How Well Do You Know Your Workforce? • www.workspace-connect.com