Employee spotlights are an essential component of any employer branding strategy. Consider this: candidates are applying to spend several years of their lives working 40 hours or more per week for your company. That is a significant commitment.
Candidates increasingly expect companies to provide insider information about what it’s like to work for them and the team culture.
Providing internal employee spotlights to candidates at various stages of the recruitment process will allow them to decide whether your company and role are a good fit for them.
This article will explain how to create an employee spotlight and also highlight 10 examples of employee spotlights.
Table of Contents
What Are Employee Spotlights?
Employee spotlights are some of the most effective content you can have on your website. This content will highlight a specific employee’s history with the company and anniversaries, accomplishments, personality, and successes.
An employee spotlight places your employees in it, allowing everyone to learn more about them and your brand. These spotlights can be extremely effective tools for fostering trust and loyalty among coworkers, potential new hires, and customers.
Questions For Employee Spotlight
- How have you found our company culture to be?
- What are some of your observations about our leadership team?
- How would you describe your team?
- What aspects of our mission do you identify with?
- What have been your most notable achievements on our team?
- Who are some of your biggest inspirations at work?
- What resources did you use while on our team?
- Which perks are your favourites, and why?
- What is the unique aspect of working here?
- How have you developed competently since joining our team?
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Benefits of Employee Spotlight
Internal Benefits
Employee spotlights are an excellent tool for fostering interpersonal connections within an organization. They aid in the dismantling of barriers between teams and coworkers.
When departments connect more deeply, it leads to greater engagement and purposeful collaboration. When current and prospective customers see social media posts of happy, engaged employees, it conveys positive company culture.
External Benefits
Employee spotlights can be extremely useful as a sales tool. Because there are many dubious companies, looking at a company’s About page and Leadership is a good idea.
When I see good content on those pages, it boosts my confidence, especially if it matches their LinkedIn profile.
Employee spotlights could give potential customers more confidence in the company and their service or product if you have complex buying behaviour, as I do.
If there isn’t chemistry, it’s probably best to call it quits before either party invests too much time or energy.
Fun and Exciting Ways to Create Employee Spotlights Your Team Will Appreciate
Employee spotlight helps you keep your best employees and boost productivity. It can also be an excellent tool for employer branding, attracting new talent, and standing out from the competition.
This is a popular method for highlighting employees that do not require a lot of investment or time.
Take a delightful picture of the employee, have them write a line or two about it, and post it on all the company’s social media pages (with all the relevant hashtags) for all the company’s followers to see. That’s all there is to it.
A simple social media shout-out can make an employee feel valued and special.
2. Employee Highlight Videos
Among the most widely used content formats is video. As a result, videos serve as effective employee spotlights. Some employees, however, may be reluctant to appear in a video.
However, it is an excellent option for those who are comfortable with it. You can delegate the task to someone in your company who can shoot and edit a simple video, or you can hire a professional if your budget allows.
3. Spotlights via Podcasts
Podcasts are also a great way to highlight an employee and are ideal for listening rather than watching.
However, similar to a video, this requires some planning regarding what questions you will cover in the podcast and what you want your employee to interact with while sharing their story.
Because this is purely audio, make it as entertaining as possible. The benefit of videos and podcasts is that they can be converted into blog posts and used on other platforms as needed.
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4. Blog Highlights
This is one of the simplest methods for putting an employee in the spotlight. All you have to do is create a series of relevant questions for your employee to answer and then create a short blog post or get your employee to write a post themselves.
You could even ask a superior or a coworker to write a brief article about the employee being recognized. This can be shortened and shared on various social media platforms.
5. Recognition on an annual or quarterly basis
Having minor events once a month/quarter or even an enormous event once a year to highlight your employees is another great way to do an employee spotlight. Bring them to the front and centre or on stage, and allow them to tell their story, answer questions, and interact with colleagues.
Things to Highlight When Designing Spotlights
- Everyone in the organization, not just upper management or prominent employees, should have an equal opportunity to be in the spotlight.
- Attempt to recognize unsung heroes and people who are not typically recognized—after all, everyone plays an important role in your organization.
- Create a spotlight to celebrate the employee’s achievements as soon as possible—celebrating old achievements is meaningless.
- When sharing a spotlight, try to use a format your target audience is familiar with.
- Having a professional handle the spotlights for your company can sometimes be worth the cost.
Examples of Employee Spotlight
Shout-Out to Employee of the Month
Do you already have an Employee of the Month program in place? If so, take it further by publicly recognizing Employee of the Month on social media. (If you don’t already have a program like this, now is the time to start!)
Instagram is ideal for this because it is a media-based platform. You can easily showcase an Employee of the Month selection by uploading an employee headshot or a brief video.
Select an allowed photo or video clip of the employee you’ve selected. When posting to your Instagram feed, write something like:
“Meet Naomi, the much-loved Head of Sales at Company X. Naomi dedicated her time in a single month to assist over 500 clients in achieving success with our product. We are honoured to have Naomi on our team and grateful for her ability to provide the quality service Californians deserve!”
If you use Instagram, don’t forget about hashtags. #employeerrecognition is always a good thing.
The Video Exhibition
In recognizing outstanding employees, photos can feel inadequate. Fortunately, with social media, you can always use video to recognize employees! (Please remember that when filming employees, you should always get their permission.)
Capture footage of your employees in action for a video showcase, whether communicating professionally with a customer, performing excellent work on a job site, or delivering a strong presentation. This is especially valuable when shared internally because it sets a good example for other employees.
If applicable, you may also want to include brief footage of award ceremonies or the presentation of certificates or trophies to employees.
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Review Highlights
Is one of your employees mentioned specifically in a customer or client review? Now is the time to acknowledge that!
You can easily highlight public employee performance reviews, which has the added benefit of promoting your standards (and your employees) to customers.
Share reviews from Yelp, Google, Angie’s List, and other sites to Facebook, including a clear mention of the employee cited.
A Brief Employee Interview
Do you run a large company with a lot of employees? If this is the case, likely, the majority of your employees do not know all of their coworkers.
You can use social media to both recognize outstanding employees and foster company camaraderie.
The employee interview has begun. Use video to record short interviews with employees you want to recognize, preferably from different departments. Ask short, informative questions in these interviews, such as “What are you most proud of?” or “What’s the best thing about being a part of our team?”
Don’t forget to emphasize the employee’s specific accomplishments! Share these interviews on your Instagram story or Facebook page.
New Employee Enthusiasm
If you’ve recently hired a new employee, show them some social media love. Recognize new hires with a quick, enthusiastic tweet, Facebook post, or Instagram post.
Here’s an example of some content you could write for a similar post:
“We are overjoyed to welcome Andrew to the XYZ family. Andrew, who has over ten years of consulting experience, already champions our values at XYZ. Andrew, welcome aboard! We can’t wait to see what you’ll do here!”
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Contests and competitions
Everyone has that one (a little too) competitive coworker. However, some competitive spirit is always beneficial. You also notice that employees have the same drive in their personal lives. Why not channel that energy into inviting employees to represent your company in a race or other type of competition? Alternatively, you could organize internal company competitions.
It should also not be too difficult to come up with ideas. You could organize it around sports such as cycling, running, swimming, etc. These could also be centered on other interests. Cooking, baking, photography, or showing a good deed.
You’d be surprised how involved people can become, especially when it comes to something they enjoy doing.
Employee Representation
What better way to share your employees’ voices than to give them the ability to use them directly? Employee advocacy tools, such as C-clamp or Bambu, allow employees to reshare content with their own commentary or suggest content for the company to share.
Other ways to increase employee advocacy include providing prompts, digital assets, hashtags, or tools to encourage people to post directly on social networking sites such as Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. For example, if you send new hire swag to an employee, include a note encouraging them to share a photo with their LinkedIn network using your employer branding hashtag.
Alternatively, contact them to inquire if you see employees using the hashtag.
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Recommendations and must-see attractions
Top recommendations for places, shows, or restaurants–these are all excellent topics for helping your team members become acquainted with their surroundings, especially if they have recently moved to join your company.
If your office is in a small town where everyone knows everything to see, you can always take a different approach and offer top recommendations on books, movies, or interesting playlists.
This type of communication can help your team members plan their time away from the office or start conversations about things they enjoy doing in their spare time. And who knows, they might even organize a team outing to get a few drinks or go to a concert after work.
Team Highlight
Team spotlights are more common in the enterprise but aren’t limited to large corporations. Introduce the team – who they are, what they are working on, and how others can contact them.
People typically are unaware of what other teams are working on and do not spend their entire day poring over the company wiki.
A team spotlight can help your entire organization (particularly new employees) stay informed and feel like they’re a part of something bigger.
Team Celebration
Nowadays, company retreats, parties, and getaways are popular. Organizing your team is relatively simple if it is small.
However, if you have a few hundred employees, some of whom work abroad, planning everything takes a lot of time and effort. You can avoid some of that hassle by including details about what’s coming and what your team members need to do to join you on a trip in your employee newsletter.
After the event, prepare a summary, send pictures and videos, and solicit employee feedback to improve your next company retreat.
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FAQs
An employee spotlight is content that highlights the employee’s history with your business, accomplishments, personalities, work anniversaries, successes, problems, and more.
Here are Fun employee spotlight questions:
What’s something about you (a fun fact) that not many people know?
What’s the last book you read?
What is your favorite hobby?
What’s the first concert you ever attended?
What’s the next place on your travel bucket list?
Are you currently binge-watching any shows?
In your employee spotlight, it’s common to talk about the company’s goal and vision, leadership, organizational culture, challenges and successes, significant projects or milestones, workplace perks and benefits, and chances for career advancement.
Conclusion
Employee spotlights are a quick, simple, and low-cost way to create authentic content that can be shared with others. They can be a lot of fun and not just about business.
Employee spotlights can connect employees, new talent, and customers to your company culture while making employees feel appreciated and potentially attracting and engaging prospective candidates. You are wasting your time if you are not using the power of employee spotlights.
References
- rockcontent.com: Employee Spotlights
- builtin.com: Employee spotlight examples
- sortlist.com: Employee spotlight template
- bethebean.com: Creative employee spotlights examples on Linkedin
- emplify.com: Employee spotlights
- ascendbusinessgrowth.com: How to create engaging employee spotlights for business growth
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