How Do You Categorize Your Employees? Try Psychographics.
Part three of a six-part series
- Part one of this series: Six Steps to Develop an Editorial Strategy for Internal Communications
- Part two: Editorial Strategies Must Incorporate Business and Team Goals
Unless your company has just one employee, your audience is not monolithic. Understanding your audience helps you choose what kind of content to create, as well as the best way to deliver the material. In other words, knowing your employees helps you develop a strong editorial strategy for internal communications.
- An editorial strategy is a plan for how your team manages, uses, and measures content, contributors, channels, analytics, and feedback to support the company’s goals.
Two Ugly Truths
Ugly Truth #1
The separate business units in your company aren’t equally important. Sure, each department will have its moment to shine — and that moment could even last months or a couple of years (think about how IT shined when everyone suddenly had to remote in during Covid-19). But the ugly truth is that some departments are just simply more important than others.
- Thought exercise: Close your eyes and imagine whether your company could keep running if X department were halved or gotten rid of altogether. I bet you can name a couple right off the bat.
That’s why you shouldn’t try to give equal coverage to every single department. The fact of the matter is that some groups will get more funding and attention than others because they are supporting one or more of the company’s strategic goals. By and large, this means that the sales department will always be important, the event planning committee…eh.
You must identify a cross-section of employees who will receive the bulk of your editorial coverage.
Ugly truth #2
Your team isn’t large enough to create content for every single business unit, week in, week out.
- Unless you have a designated storyteller embedded in every department (the dream!) you will only cover that team/group/unit a few times a year, at best.
You need to maximize your effort. You must create content that appeals to as broad of an audience as possible, without alienating any single group.
- You can achieve this goal when you rethink how you categorize your audiences.
Grouping Your Employees
There are three easy ways to categorize employees:
- Departmentally (e.g., Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain)
- Geographically (e.g., North America, APAC)
- Hierarchy (e.g., executives, middle managers, new hires)
This isn’t a bad way to categorize your audience, but it’s not very nuanced.
Further refinements could include descriptions of where employees fit broadly in a company’s operations. In a conversation I had with a managing editor at a multi-billion dollar tech firm, he drew a line between “white-collar” and “blue-collar” employees. And I’ve heard several internal comms managers at retail companies divide employees into three main groups: “corporate,“ “retail,” and “factory.”
Psychographics
Another way to categorize your audience is psychographically. Traditionally this technique is used by marketers and statisticians to classify populations based on psychological characteristics, such as values and fears.
This understanding is based on what employees value (e.g., meaning in their work; compensation), regardless of where they physically sit, which department they work in, or how long they’ve been with the company.
A twist for internal comms is to get rid of the values attributes and instead use actions as the psychographic variable. Another way to think about it is to categorize employees by the verbs that define their work. For example, employees who sell things for the company, regardless of personal values. Or employees who make things for the company, nevermind whether it’s for marketing or engineering.
Understanding your audience in this psychographic way can be a creative and fun way to mix up a traditionally straightforward comprehension of a workforce.
Category Examples
Companies are different, but most have similar functions. All large corporations, for example, have departments for HR, Marketing, Supply Chain, Security, and so on. And every company has salespeople, regardless of the size — someone is always trying to sell something (a widget, a service, an enhancement) to someone else.
Here are several examples of psychographic categories you can use to group your employees:
- Create: Those who make things, like programmers and factory line workers
- Sell: Those who sell things, whether it’s products or sponsorships or ads
- Serve: Those who provide internal and external customer service
- Drive: Those who seek to become better personally and professionally
- Influence: Those who try to change minds and behaviors, like Marketing, Public Relations, and public figures
- Invest: Those who invest for clients or in communities (this is especially useful for financial institutions)
- Observe: Those outside the company, like recruits, activists, and media. Note: Internal Communications has no control over targeting this group!
Depending on your company and industry, you can easily come up with more action categories, like:
- Mover: At an airline company, pilots, baggage handlers, and freight shippers are all moving something from point A to point B.
- Fixers: Plumbers? Doctors? PR agents?
- Maintainers: Mechanics? Power plant monitors? Social media mavens?
A company’s overarching organization also dictates how you categorize employees.
- A vertically-integrated company like Target, for example, has designing, manufacturing, distribution, and selling groups.
- A disbursed company like Uber, quite differently, has drivers and technologists and probably a service group.
And on and on. It’s fun! And it gets you thinking about your employees in ways that might not have occurred. Moreover, it forces employees you thought were different (e.g., ad designers and JavaScript writers) into the same group. After all: one team, one dream, right?
Content Creation
Now that you’ve organized your employees into different categories based on what they do, you can create content that appeals across departmental, geographic, and hierarchical borders.
Salespeople may sell different things — ads, luggage, subscriptions, veggie burgers — but they’re all essentially selling.
- Broad topics like “the art of the sale,” “presentation skills,” and “how to network at conferences” appeals to people who sell, regardless of what they’re hocking.
Cutting across demographic borders in this way makes your team more efficient, insomuch that you can reach more employees with one piece of content than if you were to write something very specific for a particular team.
In part four of this series, I’ll explain how you can use content series to optimize your internal comms strategy.
If you want help with creating an editorial strategy for your team, reach out. I’d be happy to provide some advice and consultation. Email me at editorshaun@gmail.com.
