How personality profiling can eliminate guesswork when planning employee events and engagement strategies
This article was originally written for, and published by, The HR Director magazine in July 2023.
Insights around employee personality profiles are now a powerful tool in enabling HR professionals to shape employee events and experiences, communication strategies and learning programmes.
To support HR professional’s understanding the global events and engagement agency Live Group, which has offices in London and Singapore, has launched AudienceDNA: a game changing employee profiling tool to help HR leaders improve staff engagement and retention.
To formulate a profile, employees are asked to answer a handful of simple questions on AudienceDNA.com. The resulting data is analysed by Live Group to determine the audience’s personality make-up, then married with the team’s insight and intelligence to help HR leaders curate tailored employee event and engagement strategies.
Live Group has revealed the eight most common AudienceDNA profile types so far identified across an organisation, based on more than 1,000 survey responses. Please note these are basic summaries not the whole description of profile types:
- Champions – Enjoy seeing others succeed and aren’t quiet about letting them know about it. Champions’ ideal events should be built around an ability to interact and explore with people similarly committed to exploring each other’s stories.
- Socialites – The kind of person that would happily skip a speaker session to have a coffee with someone. Socialites want to attend events where they can connect with others in a comfortable and welcoming environment.
- Explorers – Believe that experience is king, and if an event isn’t offering something memorable, it’s not worth the effort. Explorers will expect an event to offer something that they can’t get anywhere else.
- Debaters – Love engaging with people from all over the globe from the comfort of their own home. For Debaters, an event is all about connection and they want opportunities to share their views on a variety of issues
- Campaigners – Keen to motivate and inspire others. Campaigners work best with small, comfortable content dynamics, with a lot of interaction with an event’s hosts.
- Adventurers – Looking for experiences they can’t get anywhere else. For Adventurers, an event should push something unique that grabs their attention. Within digital events, this means seamless connection with the platform, high quality delivery, and novel technology.
- Professors – Love learning and picking up new thoughts, ideas, and concepts. But large parts of an event might not be interesting to Professors, so event planners should allow them to get what they want and ignore the rest.
- Spectators – Looking to create memories, even if they won’t share them afterwards. Spectators expect a premium experience that offers something they’ve either not seen before or not experienced in a certain way.
Knowing employees’ engagement preferences ahead of time eliminates guesswork previously associated with planning internal events and experiences like sales rallies, AGMs, training days, onboarding, conferences and more.”
Stephen D. Pickett, Managing Director – Live Group
Engaging employees with a personalised approach
“Delivering more personalised experiences can positively impact attendance, compliance and engagement and we all know a more engaged workforce is also more productive, happier and likely to stay in the job,” continued Stephen.
“AudienceDNA arrives at an opportune time when recent research by Oxford Economics and Unum has shown that the average ‘hard’ cost of turnover for an employee earning £25,000 a year or more is £30,614. Of course, that doesn’t include ‘soft’ costs including reputational damage and battered employee morale, which can lead to increased turnover. Given many businesses are operating in a talent drought and an era of high inflation and rising costs, it’s no surprise priorities are now switching from recruitment to retention.
“The personalisation abilities of AudienceDNA will only become more important to retention in the future: the next generation is hyper aware of customisation – they want everything to be tailored, accessible and quick – and forward-thinking organisations should be addressing this as soon as possible.”
AudienceDNA in action
Several of Live Group’s government, financial services, and trading and investment clients are among those pioneering the use of AudienceDNA in shaping their engagement strategies around events. The Global Office of the BDO organisation used Audience DNA to profile around 200 of its senior management team prior to planning a leadership conference.
Julia Johnson, Global Brand & Marketing Director at BDO, commented: “Our objective was to obtain genuine engagement and participation from all those attending and the resulting detail of their personalities and preferences allowed us to respond to the different preferred learning styles amongst our delegates. The information also helped us to guide our speakers and presenters in building the right content and delivering an optimum engagement approach. A key learning, for example, was that peer-to-peer presentations are core for our leaders.”
It’s not only the live elements of the event that can be shaped using AudienceDNA, as Julia Johnson added: “Additionally, in order to make the most of how the audience engages with content, we used the profiling data to frame our pre-event communications, creating differing messaging formats for the different learning types, i.e., recognition, learning, social and experience.”
Take the test now for free: https://audiencedna.com/
