Creating Internal Personas at Creditas
Aligning HR expertise with the UX approach in the creation of Creditas' Internal Personas: driving excellence and employee satisfaction.
In this article, we explore the Persona research process carried out at Creditas, which allowed us to delve into the motivations, desires and expectations of our team. We will share the findings and insights we gained and how this information was applied to create a more exciting and productive work environment.
We map the profiles, desires and motivations of people who work at Creditas to establish more effective engagement, retention and talent attraction initiatives
A Persona is a fictional representation of a real user profile based on their desires, expectations and aspirations, as well as any observable behavioral patterns. It is created from data obtained from surveys of users.
Research Context
Every time I start research, I ask myself:
- Why are we researching?
- Who are we researching for ?
These were the questions I raised when the People team (the famous HR) brought us the demand to identify the profiles of our Crew, how we name the people who work here.
The objective was to improve the experience of these people at Nave and also boost our attraction and retention of talent through an even more assertive strategy, truly connected with the people who work here.
This is only possible because, traditionally, Persona segmentation helps us to have personalized information about each type of audience. Who are the people at Creditas, after all, beyond what we suppose or imagine about them?
Knowing your main desires, expectations and aspirations, for example, we can create personalized actions that contribute to increasing engagement at work, building more assertive communication, winning over potential talent, among others.
It was time to start.
How we started the research
With more than 3,500 Crew members on board in Brazil, a lot of diversity and hundreds of realities, we chose to segment our Personas according to the different areas of Creditas.
After all, it was expected that people in sales would be different from people in engineering, for example.
In addition to the division by areas, our focus on diversity also led us to seek two Personas for each sector: one with diversity dimensions and one without. This way, we would guarantee the construction of understanding of both realities.
For 2022, we prioritize the construction of personas for the areas of Engineering, Product, Data Engineering and Customer Journey.
These sectors were chosen according to People data, which indicated a greater need to attract or retain these talents in variables such as turnover , volume of job openings and acceptance rates for job offers.
With this, the second step was to have access to these people's data.
Who are? What do they feed on? Where are they going?
With the People Analytics team, we obtained information related to gender, age, education level, region in which they live, ethnicity and functions of people in these areas, following all the rules of the LGPD (General Data Protection Law).
From there, we carry out an analysis of this demographic data to identify what we call Extreme Profiles , that is, those who are at the “limit” of the established parameters.
A person with a master's level of education and another with a high school education, for example, are considered extreme profiles. The same methodology was applied to other parameters, such as gender, age and ethnicity. This is a way to ensure that people with different profiles are interviewed within the same round.
Extreme profile defined, now what?
Having a script for the interview paves the way for a deep and fluid conversation with users. To do this, we included short, open-ended questions to encourage them to share their experiences.
The roadmap included the active participation of the People team, which contributed important and enriching suggestions aimed at the needs of the strategy. No excesses.
The Diversity & Inclusion team, for example, ensured that questions within the diversity sections (for Black People, Women, LGBTQIA+ and PWDs) were asked in the best way, with the careful and empathetic look that these topics deserve.
Thus, the script was divided into five parts:
1- Presentation: Age, hobbies, region where they live, and whatever else the person felt comfortable talking about.
2- Personality: What content do they like to consume outside of Creditas, on different platforms; and what your personal and professional dreams are;
3- Learning: How they usually study and develop professionally;
4- Recruitment: What they value or what they would not tolerate in a selection process;
5- Credits: What are the preferred communication channels internally; and how they see good leadership.
Script prepared, it’s time to recruit participants.
Using the Extreme Profiles base as a reference, we defined the initial sample of six crew members per area to begin recruitment. For the Engineering Persona, for example, we invited six people from the area; for Product, plus six; and so on.
As the research involved people who work at Creditas, the recruiting process was quite simple and easy (who would have thought recruiting would be easy!) . We also presented participants with iFood coupons.
Slack was used to start conversations and send invitations for interviews with each Creditas Member. The scheduling of interviews was done via Google Meet.
Script in hand, interview scheduled!
How we conduct and analyze interviews
The interview is a simple and easy way to learn more about the perceptions of reality of the people interviewed.
We are able to collect important information that cannot be obtained from analytics, demographic information, or guesswork alone.
At this stage, the most important thing is to make the person being interviewed comfortable.
Conversations took an average of 30 minutes . During this time, people had the opportunity to express themselves freely, without judgment of their responses or behaviors.
Once the interview stage was completed, the conversations were transcribed. This was one of the biggest challenges of the project.
All interviews were recorded with the authorization of the person interviewed. At the end of each interview, I also wrote down important information acquired during the exchange.
And, in order not to miss any important points, it was necessary to watch the recording and transcribe it manually. A 30-minute interview, for example, takes at least 2 hours to transcribe. I thought: this isn't cool.
This pain of mine made me look for other tools that would help me in this stage. I discovered Looppanel , which is still in the testing phase. Since then, I have been using it in my projects and providing feedback.
Another tool used was the WebCaptioner website , which transcribes the interview in real time. Platforms like this help the interviewer to focus more on the conversation and not worry about taking notes, in addition to saving time during post-chat analysis.
Once the transcription phase was completed, the information was entered into the Google Sheets platform. The table model makes it easy to visualize the answers of each person interviewed. Data such as facts, patterns and behaviors stand out, contributing to the creation of “Insights”.
Finally, the personas
After completing the research and compiling all the information, “Personas” were created to illustrate the different profiles found.
This is the vision that a Persona should have: objective, intuitive and with all the main answers collected. Furthermore, the image of a real person helps to realize that these qualities are beyond the imaginary, and that they belong to hundreds of real people in the area analyzed.
And what are the results?
The journey taken during this project was very enriching for both the Crew and Creditas.
Throughout the process, participants expressed satisfaction in knowing that the company they work for is interested in getting to know them better.
Furthermore, People teams such as Talent Acquisition, Internal Communications and Employer Branding already use profiles to outline their strategies.
One of the changes is already in effect: shorter internal communication for Customer Journey teams, whose Personas prefer more objective texts.
People in technology areas value their salary more when accepting a job offer. Sales candidates, on the other hand, prioritize benefits. All these lessons learned with Personas are used when attracting good talent to Creditas.
And these changes go further: currently, Personas are used to demonstrate to senior leadership how diversity is a fundamental topic for people within the Nave, resulting in concrete actions for people's inclusion.
In the future
The next steps consist of finalizing the next Personas scheduled for other areas of the Ship and continuing to teach different teams about these results.
It's a joy to be able to learn and contribute by listening to those who matter most to our business: people.
If you'd like to talk more about this topic, share feedback, or ask a question, send me a message or connect with me on LinkedIn .
❤ I thank Josi Portela and Leonardo Mastelini for their support in this project.
