5 Reasons for Having Staff Photos on your Intranet
1. It encourages familiarity and discourages cold responses: you are less likely to be cross with someone who has a face. When you just get an email or a mandate from someone that you don’t know, you deal with it in a more sterile fashion. Putting a face to a name adds the human touch
2. It encourages community. So many of our departments in businesses suffer from the silo effect. Becoming familiar with someone’s face breeds instant recognition at meetings, casual encounters (in and out of the workplace) and especially if you are swapping comments and conversations via the employee walls
3. It provides a sense of identity to a department, group or business. If you see a group of faces when visiting the Facilities department, you see them as real people versus a list of names or positions. Knowing their faces takes you immediately to the level of “I know you” and changes the nature of your interactions. The department then has a visual identity through the intranet that is not easy to forget. This is true for staff-to-staff, but also staff-to-administration and administration-to-staff
4. New or transferred staff can be highlighted on the intranet home page as a “Look Who Joined Us” section. This builds community, a sense of belonging and enables the new person to more quickly become a part of the group
5. For each person, their face on the intranet allows them to say to the organization “I am not just a name or a position, I have an identity and I am happy to share it with everyone”. That may sounds pretty 60’s but that sort of effect raises staff value in a way that really can’t be measured.