Include interesting questions to spark non-work related conversations
People tend to work better when they like who they’re working with, not just what they’re working on. So instead of only including work related bios such as role and responsibilities in the profiles, try to ask teammates to answer interesting questions and share some fun facts about themselves like “what are your secret talents?”, “what is the favourite place that you have travelled to?” to help teammates spark conversations beyond work matters.
Giving your employees an easy way, like a simple employee profile, to get to know one another beyond the workplace can help them relate to one another and also improve the work experience for them as a whole.
This is especially important if you are a remote team. Unlike on-site workers who often bump into each other and can grab a quick lunch or coffee together easily, for remote workers, you need to recreate opportunities for them to mingle so that they too can experience the camaraderie of having coworkers who are also friends.
While you can use tools like Donut to encourage casual chats among teammates, this information teammates share in their profile can be a good starting point for their conversations.
Share these teammate profiles with new hires
When there are new hires joining your company, share these teammate profiles to the new hires and ask them to fill in their own as well so your workers can get to know them better, too. Of course, this is just the starting point for the new hires to get to know the team and you should schedule proper welcome sessions to introduce the new hires to the team as well. One thing that makes the difference: put filling in the profile on the new hire’s first-week checklist rather than leaving it as an optional link, since an optional link is easy to forget and often stays blank.
