While “Staff” or “Meet the Team” pages aren’t a necessity for an online business, there are many good reasons to include one. Nowadays there is a growing concern over the credibility of online companies—especially ones that visitors have never heard of before. People are wary of online scams and phishing, and they may dismiss a website entirely if they feel ill at ease with it. By including a staff page and thereby adding a personal touch, the faces behind your company’s name become more than simple static.
Particularly for businesses where sales credibility and/or human contact is important, trust-building tools are essential. By allowing your readers to get to know you and the people who work for you, the chances of leaving a lasting impression on that reader are much higher. In addition, learning more about the faces behind a company builds an almost personal connection with the reader, and people are always more likely to do business with those they feel they are familiar with.
There are two common places where staff information can be inserted. The first, of course, would be a separate team page labeled specifically for that purpose. Other times people will merge staff information with their “About” page. This is more or less acceptable depending on the company. The primary concern of an “About” page is to provide an outline of who you are as a company: your mission, history, and so on. A “Staff” page is more focused on getting to know the people behind the scenes who make the business move. The information provided for these two pages can be similar or very different. Whether or not they should both be merged into one page is entirely up to you.
Regardless of where you put it, the same principles apply when it comes to adding information about your team. There are a few basics that nearly all staff pages have, and for good reason—they work well. The first is employee photos. Most of the time, staff pages will have photos of each member of the team. Some are candid or casual, some humorous, some professionally done. Some companies prefer to use avatars or drawings, even. These pictures are likely to be the reader’s first and largest impression of your team, and possibly your company, so be sure to give some thought to what kind of image you want to leave them with.
Apart from a picture, you may want to provide a few details about the members of your team. Perhaps it’s simply their name and role in the company. Or maybe you’d like to include other titles, a bio, contact information, quotes, and so on. The decision is yours, but remember that consistency is key. If you’re going to have one member fill out an entire profile to post beside their picture, it would probably be best to have the other members do it as well.
If your employees have a Twitter, LinkedIn, personal website, etc., their profile is an excellent place to include it. Not only will it allow your visitor to investigate them further and see what they’re up to, it also allows for the possibility to contact you or a member of your team via the platform the reader is most comfortable with. One thing to be careful of, however, is the content that your employees might be posting. Especially if the account you’re linking to isn’t a “professional” account, you might want to look over your employee’s page and ensure that what they’re putting there is appropriate for your readers to see. The last thing you want is a member of your team complaining on a linked Twitter account about how incompetent everyone in your company is. If anything on their page might damage the company’s reputation, you might want to steer clear of including it.
If you have a large number of employees, you can always opt to involve only your senior members or leadership board. Having too many faces on a page might come across as intimidating—especially if a there is a massive bio beside each of them as well. One thing you might consider doing if you’d like to include a profile for a large amount of team members is have their picture or name link to an expanded profile page. Thus, if a visitor would like to read more about a specific person, they can click through to view additional details without having to wade through everyone’s information.
Ultimately, the decision of whether to include a staff page and what to put on it is entirely up to you. Just remember, people like to know who they are working with. The more you can do to show them that you are, in fact, a person just like them and not simply a faceless corporation, the better.
