For your business to succeed, you need your employees to be engaged. They need to be productive. They need to stick around for the long haul. And the answer to all of these problems just might be employee profiles – documents that contain all the information you need to know about your team so you can create the best workplace possible for them. 

Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Employee profiles are a hugely valuable resource that your organization needs to implement ASAP. Get the lowdown on what a good employee profile looks like and how it will help your organization.

What is an employee profile?

An employee profile details who your employee is – both professionally and on a personal level! You can think of it almost like a social media profile, with information like the employee’s name and contact information. However, an employee profile goes a bit deeper. It’s a comprehensive document that includes any and all relevant information about the person’s journey with your company.

• Employee’s name (including nickname, if relevant)
• Preferred pronouns
• Date of birth
• Bio
• Job title
• Professional skills
• Who they report to or manage 
• Links to their social media accounts

We recommend creating profiles for every employee in your organization by establishing them as part of your onboarding process for new employees. During onboarding, you can communicate with the new employee to gather the information needed to create their profile. Alternatively, you can have them fill out their own information directly.

And why not take it a step further with the power of video? With Workvivo’s Say Hi feature, your new joiners will be prompted to share a brief video, inviting them to introduce themselves, share their background, and talk about their hobbies.

The benefits of employee profiling

Employee profiles may take some time to compile, but it’s time well spent. They’re a great way to connect with remote employees, improve your recruitment and onboarding processes, and even give insights into your workforce diversity. We’ll dive into all these advantages of employee profiling and more in the sections below.

1) Keeps remote workers connected

For fully or partially remote teams, it can be challenging to feel connected with other team members. Research from Airspeed shows that 72% of remote workers feel like they can’t socialize enough, and 33% are lonely. But building social connections at work is important for your employees’ mental health and overall company success: The same study finds that 96% of executives believe employees who feel connected with one another are more motivated and productive.

This is one place where profiling can help. Think about a friend who lives in another city or state. When you miss them, or you’re curious about what they’ve been up to, do you visit their social media profile? 

Employee profiles allow team members, particularly remote employees, to get to know one another on a deeper level. If your employee profiles are accessible via your company intranet, everyone can access them to learn more about their colleagues in other cities – or states, or countries! (For examples of effective intranet setups for various industries, check out our help resource: 10 Real Examples of Intranet for Different Industries.)

2) Improved recruitment and retention

Understanding the demographics and qualifications of your current employees can help with targeting new ones. Profiles provide deeper insight into the kind of employees on your team. The information included in employee profiles will give you a better idea of the kind of people you usually hire so you can recruit new candidates who will be a great fit, too. Your human resources department can even use profiles of current employees to hire from within the organization. 

What’s more, employee profiles can help with retention in addition to recruitment. Employees who are highly engaged at work are less likely to leave the organization. And as we’ve already seen, creating profiles indirectly improves employee engagement because these profiles help you understand and meet your employees at the intersection of their needs and wants.

3) Provides a better understanding of workforce diversity

Employees from diverse backgrounds have a lot to offer your organization: a 2015 McKinsey study finds that companies with high racial and ethnic diversity enjoyed 35% more financial gains than non-diverse competitors. Similarly, the study also finds that organizations with high gender diversity saw 15% more financial returns.

But the benefits of a diverse workplace go way beyond your bottom line. You also open your organization up to new perspectives and innovation that you’d never get from a team of workers from very similar backgrounds.

Employee profiling allows companies to identify areas lacking diversity and make concerted recruiting efforts to improve in those areas. When you have profiles of all your employees in one place, you can more easily assess your workforce to understand if it’s lacking employees of a certain demographic (like race, gender, or ability). 

4) Offers better compliance and risk management 

Employee profiling can even have legal benefits. Creating profiles of each employee will help companies ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, such as affirmative action and equal opportunity laws. Having profiles on hand will also make it easier to identify potential risks, such as workforce imbalances that could lead to discrimination claims. 

5) Overall increase in employee satisfaction and engagement

Employee profiling gives you a deeper understanding of your employees, making it easier to create better policies and a richer work culture. When you understand your employees, you’ll be able to structure your workplace in the best way for them – and in turn, you’ll see your bottom line improve, too. Research from Gallup finds that businesses with more engaged employees see: 

• 10% higher customer metrics
• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability 

Sounds good, right? Employee profiles will help you get there. An employee who feels a sense of belonging is more likely to work hard and seek success for the entire team. The information contained in employee profiles helps you create the kind of workplace that fosters this engagement, which leads to success.

Tips for creating employee profiles 

Ready to start creating employee profiles? They aren’t difficult. But there are still a few key best practices to follow to make sure you can get the most out of them. Take a look at these employee profile tips. 

Keep profiles short and sweet

There’s no need for your employee profiles to look like a novel. You don’t need to know every last detail of an employee’s life – only the parts that are relevant to their job. Carefully consider what information you actually need. Then leave the rest out. You want to be able to take in the details you need with a glance… and you don’t want to scare employees away from filling out a massive profile.

Update and review regularly

People change. Over time, information like their address, the teams they’re part of, or their bio might change. Once you’ve created employee profiles, review them quarterly and make any changes or additions necessary. You should also archive any profiles of employees who are no longer with the company – you don’t want inactive profiles taking up space. 

Use a consistent tone and keep branding the same

Employee profiles are internal documents and should be branded as such. Use a consistent tone of voice in each one, too. This will ensure you aren’t showing any favoritism and will also simply make it easier to read each one. Plus, internal branding helps strengthen your company culture.

As you gather information for each employee profile, be consistent with the information you collect. Then follow your brand guidelines, just like you would when writing a blog post or other piece of content, as you write the profiles. When employees see their completed, fully branded profiles, they’ll feel like they belong.

Consider using software (like Workvivo)

While employee profiles aren’t necessarily hard to create, these important resources do take a lot of time. 

This is where an employee profile software can help. 

Consider using a platform like Workvivo to get the job done. Even if you already have existing profiles in another system, Workvivo can integrate with third-party systems to automatically move users into the Workvivo platform. You can also manually add users if needed, making it easy for employees to hop in to fill out their own information if that’s the workflow you prefer. 

Learn more about how to set up employee profiles in Workvivo. 

Employee profiles examples and formats

There’s no one-size-fits-all format for an employee profile, and your choice will depend greatly on your organization’s needs. To get you started, here are two sample templates you can draw inspiration from.

Basic employee profile example

This first employee profile sticks to the basics, covering only the essential, need-to-know information.

• Employee name: John Doe
• Location: Chicago office
• Email address: johndoe@company.com
• Phone number: 123-456-7890
• Job title: Marketing manager
• Professional skills: Organization, creativity, leadership, team building, SEO, social media, content management, data analysis
• Reports to: Marketing director
• Manages: Graphic designers, copywriters, social media marketing manager

If you’re okay with your employee profiles being on the leaner side, you don’t need to include much more information than this. Alternatively, if you’re trying to create profiles for all of your existing employees, consider setting up these basic profiles as placeholders. You can go back and add extra information later, but this kind of profile will work in a pinch.

Comprehensive employee profile example

If you want your employee profiles to be more detailed, you may decide to use something a little closer to this:

• Employee name: Jane Doe (Mrs.)
• Gender: Female, she/her 
• Date of birth: 3/4/1985
• Bio: Jane Doe attended ABC College, graduating with an MBA in accounting. Prior to joining our team, she worked at ABC and at XYZ companies. Jane has excellent critical thinking skills and competently leads our team of junior accountants. When not working, she enjoys traveling with her husband and children.
• Location and address: Remote from Saint Paul, MN
• Email address: janedoe@company.com
• Phone number: 123-456-7890
• Start date: 7/1/2014 as staff accountant; promoted to senior accountant 4/2018 
• Department: Finance
• Job title: Senior accountant
• Professional skills: Analytics, critical thinking, technology (ERP proficiency), communication, leadership, time management
• Personality traits: Clever, friendly, insightful, competent, patient, confident 
• Interests: Cycling, baking, traveling
• Reports to: Financial controller
• Manages: Junior accountants

Whew. This profile gives you a truly solid understanding of who Jane is, her role within your organization, but also who she is outside the office. Treating your employees as individuals and understanding they have a life outside the workplace helps them feel more valued and appreciated for who they are – not just what they can do.

Create better employee profiles with Workvivo

Every company should have employee profiles as part of their enterprise intranet solution. The benefits to your company culture, employee engagement, and work experience are unparalleled. By creating a profile page for each team member, you’ll see engagement and productivity rise.

Get started by setting up your profiles in Workvivo: software that serves as the digital heart of your organization. With options for automatic user provisioning or entering your employee directory manually, it’s easier than ever to save employee information in a format that works for you.