Empower Your Team with Authentic Portraits
As a product designer with a background in cinematography, I’ve always been a believer in the power of imagery.
On my old team at Microsoft, I participated in an Employee Resource Group designed to help foster a more inclusive workplace. As we talked about some of the issues we faced and how the group might be able to have an immediate impact, it was clear that many of us felt like we didn’t have photos that reflected us as we wanted to be seen by the professional world.
Corporate headshots are nothing new — but canned, overly-produced headshots often feel hollow and inauthentic.
As part of my contribution to this Employee Resource Group, I wanted to provide people with engaging, high-quality portraits that empowered them to present themselves in the world with confidence and authenticity.
What are the benefits for your team?
When evaluating how to prioritize this kind of initiative within your team and determine if the impact is worth the cost, consider the benefits:
- Democratization of high-quality photography for everyone on the team that reflects their unique identity
- A cohesive and professional face for your team going into hiring season
- Gives your team the confidence to go out and represent the work that they do (both internally and externally)
The photos can be used in so many ways:
- Accompanying a speaker bio for a presentation at a conference
- A profile photo for a Teams or Slack account
- At the back of a deck when attributing credit to the people who worked on it (including a photo rather than a text attribution increases visibility)
- A public-facing profile or banner photo on LinkedIn
…and more! Anywhere your team needs to have a presence, having high-quality photos that authentically reflect them can help.
How did we approach it?
We hired a talented photographer (David Rzegocki) who creates beautiful naturalistic portraits to come to our campus for a day and shoot photos for 20 people on the team.
Before the shoot day, I scouted locations all over the main campus and scheduled our participants to make sure everyone ended up with unique and interesting backdrops and to avoid a stale “rinse-and-repeat” aesthetic. I looked for different colors and textures, depth, and lots of natural light.
Our photographer worked with each participant for a 20 minute session to help create portraits that were representative of their identity and the impression they wanted to make in the world.
In addition to the individual portraits, we also allowed people to participate in group sessions where we captured action shots of people doing what they normally do in their day-to-day jobs: collaborating, presenting, brainstorming, ideating, and more.
We shot these photos so that people could have imagery to share in a presentation or article talking about their process and how they approached their job (rather than just pulling generic stock photos from the web).
After the session, each participant ended up with a set of 4–8 individual portraits and some group photos.
3+ years later, many of us are still using the photos from this session for all kinds of exciting projects we’re working on:
How should you approach this on your own team?
If you’re considering offering portrait photography to your team, here are a few tips to consider:
- Find a photographer who will work with your team to capture engaging and naturalistic individualized portraits — not someone who will set up a stool and a backdrop like a school photo and photograph every person in exactly the same way.
- Provide sufficient time for the photographer to work with each subject, and take breaks in between so the photographer can recharge creatively. Ask them what schedule they think will work best.
- Have your team bring any props they want — for example, if they work on a hardware or wearables team, they might want some photographs with the product.
- Encourage your team to dress in whatever helps them feel most confident.
- Scout locations in advance and find a diverse assortment of locations. Look for textures, color, depth, and natural light.
- Allow people to opt into photos that illustrate their day-to-day work. I wish we had shot more of these! It’s so useful having photography that illustrates process and collaboration.
- If your team is distributed, you could consider setting this up as an activity during an offsite when everyone comes together to meet in person. If your team is remote and you have the budget for it, you could explore giving each person an individual budget to book a local photographer in their area for a mini session.
Ultimately, bringing in a photographer to capture portraits for your team can be hugely impactful.
By providing people with images that feel both professional and authentic, you can help them feel more confident and more likely to share their great ideas with the world — and elevate your team’s visibility as a result.
