The Persona Problem: Why We Need to Rethink Employee Experience Design

Personas have been a staple of design for years. They give us a simple story: “Sarah, a manager who’s always pressed for time,” or “James, a new hire who struggles with onboarding.” By putting a face on a segment, personas make it easier for leaders to imagine how their people might interact with a new experience, service, or product.

At the start of a project, that’s useful. Personas help create focus, spark empathy, and get stakeholders on the same page.

The problem is that personas quickly become misleading. They lock people into a fixed identity permanently, as though Sarah will always be overwhelmed and James will always be confused. Real people don’t stand still. Their needs and behaviours change constantly, influenced by role changes, life stages, managers, new tools, and external pressures.

An employee who cared most about flexibility during one phase of their career might later focus on progression. Someone disengaged in one context can be highly motivated in another. Personas miss these shifts because they capture only a snapshot in a moment in time.

The pace of change at work makes this issue even sharper. Hybrid models reversing, ever-shifting expectations, AI in daily tasks, and continued economic uncertainty fuelled largely by a volatile geopolitical landscape all mean the workforce is in flux. A persona written during a discovery workshop in January can feel out of date by September.

When leaders continue to design against personas, they risk creating services that feel generic, blunt, or irrelevant. And because personas give the illusion of insight, organisations often don’t notice the gap until adoption fails.

So if personas aren’t up to the job, what should replace them? How can organisations design experiences that stay relevant as employees’ needs evolve in a more dynamic way? And how do you deliver that at scale without reverting to a one-size-fits-all model?

The alternative is hyper-personalisation, built on aggregated data across the enterprise. Instead of guessing what a “typical” manager or graduate wants, organisations can draw on live signals from the systems people already use:

• HR platforms showing career moves, skills, and progression paths

• Learning tools capturing interests, completions, and gaps

• Collaboration systems revealing working rhythms, and networks

• Engagement and wellbeing tools reflecting employee health, sentiment, and stress levels

Each source gives a valuable part of the story. But, together, they form a constantly updated picture of each individual’s context, habits, and needs. This isn’t about replacing empathy with cold numbers and graphs. It’s about scaling empathy; making sure every service or communication lands in a way that feels personal, intuitive and timely.

Hyper-personalisation brings four big advantages:

• Relevance: Messages, services, and nudges match what an individual actually needs in that moment.

• Adaptability: Experiences shift as people change roles, develop skills, or encounter new challenges.

• Engagement: Employees feel understood and supported, not grouped into a stereotype.

• Impact: Interventions land more effectively, because they are based on real behaviour, not assumptions.

It also changes the role of workforce and workplace leaders. The job isn’t to map a handful of journeys and hope they stay useful. It’s to set up the data flows, governance, and ethical guardrails that let experiences flex automatically. The organisation designs the conditions, not just the outputs.

Let's be clear though- personas still have a place as a starting point. But if they become the end point or the anchor, they’re a liability. In today’s workplace, treating employees as static archetypes is like using an outdated map in a city that changes every day.

Organisations that stick with personas will continue to design blunt experiences that miss the mark. Those that embrace hyper-personalisation will deliver something different: experiences that move dynamically and in sync with their people, not behind them.

So the real question is: are you still designing for personas, or are you ready to design for real people?