How one company is revolutionising employee profiles

Enboarder is moving full-steam ahead as it reimagines the future of workplace culture. Brent Pearson is the founder of Enboarder, an employee engagement and onboarding platform. According to Mr Pearson, its vision is to “create better human connections” across all aspects of the employee journey.

“So I find myself and most of my product team are asking ourselves that question, ‘What can we do with our platform or product to create better human connections?’ What we’re doing is we’ve reimagined what the employee profile looks like.”

Mr Pearson explained that employee profiles, especially when working remotely, offer no insight into who you are “beyond your title”.

Enboarder is in the works of implementing personalised employee profiles, as inspired by baseball cards.

“Think about all the systems that you interact with at work. A lot of them have got profiles of employees and it’s usually this, what I call ‘A9 headshot’.”

“So you’ve got a head, congratulations. So do I! It doesn’t tell me anything about you. And then it might give me your email address or maybe your mobile phone, but I don’t know anything about you from your profile,” Mr Pearson explained.

He offers an alternate solution: “You’ve got a deck of baseball cards and you flick through them. You’ve got this hero image on the front, and on the back, you’ve got all this information about the employees. We’re going to use that metaphor.”

“We’re going to try to create a profile where people can actually express who they are. So on the front, the hero image we’re going to be saying to people, ‘upload a photograph of you doing something that you love’.”

“Then on the back, imagine I’m asking you a series of questions … if I then said to you ‘At work, how do I get the best out of you? What brings out the best in you?’ How would you respond to that?” he prompted The HR Leader.

“We’ve now got a deck of baseball cards for our employees that have that richness of information. But imagine then I can use that for matching and for browsing and for building connections.”

“Those are the building blocks.”

Mr Pearson explained that if businesses are to foster connectivity between employees working from home, that online innovations will become the future of work.

“You can’t look back and just wish for the good old days. It’s not going to happen. I think what you’ve got to do is just accept where we’re going and say, ‘Right now, how do I take advantage of all of the best things that this has got to offer and how do I minimise the downsides?’”

“If we can have a remote/hybrid engaged workforce with connectivity across people, even though they’re not in the same physical space, then I think you get the best of both worlds,” he concluded.

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Brent Pearson, click below: