The employee blog is the ideal way to enable a new hire to introduce themselves during social onboarding - allowing the new hire to tell their story in a way that sparks connections and feels true to their own personality. 

Check out this guide for a crash course on the employee blog, followed by a deep dive on best practices.

What is an Employee Blog?

The employee blog is exactly what it sounds like: a short, open-ended introduction, written by the employee, to introduce themselves asynchronously and share their personal and professional background with their team, in whatever level of detail they like. An Employee Blog is the ideal option of the four main formats for new hire intros. 

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While this format is called a “blog”, this doesn’t imply that the information is public or posted to the internet. This information should only be shared internally.  

The main benefit of this exercise is that, done right, it can give the new hire the space and flexibility to introduce themselves in whatever way they feel comfortable, and using the content that will be most helpful in sharing their personality with their team. Are you very family oriented, and like when your coworkers know the people back home? Talk about it and share a photo. Do you have a side hustle or passion project that you’re really proud of, and shows a side of yourself that you want your colleagues to know? Add a link. Or are you a more private person, and want to share very little about these things with your peers? Keep it short and simple.

The main challenge with the employee blog is that being handed a blank page on your first day and being told to “introduce yourself” can be an unpleasant experience. Even for practiced writers, the task is daunting: what should you include or exclude? How long should it be? What is “normal” at the new organization? While the goal isn’t to conform, it can be uncomfortable to be thrust into such a personal exercise before anyone really knows you, and with minimal understanding of the company culture. 

The following guide is designed to make writing a great employee blog easy. In it, we will review:

1. A list of ideas on what to include (and not include) in an employee blog
2. Some best practices when standing up an employee blog as part of your social onboarding program
3. A comparison of the employee blog with another similar team building ritual, the Life Story Exercise.

What belongs in an employee blog?

Key Topics to Include

Here are the most important topics that should be included in most employee blogs to help spur social connections and conversation:

The basics: your name, role and team

Include any preferred nicknames. If your name is less common, or if the pronunciation is different from how it is spelled, consider a pronunciation guide.

Hi! My name is Tapan (sounds like Japan). I’ll be joining as the Senior Product Manager for Mobile.

Hometown, then and now

Describe where you grew up, and where you live now. 

I was born in Kerala, a state in South India, but moved to Baltimore with my family when I was five and have lived here ever since (go Orioles!). 

Important people or pets

Describe any important people or pets in your life. And share a photo - coworkers love to see the creatures behind the names! 

I live with my husband Micah and my three boys Shiloh, Casey and Yale. After Shiloh was born, I really wanted a girl, and then I had twin boys :) Below is a photo of them rock climbing for the first time - they’re already better than I am! 

Favourite things

Describe any hobbies or interests outside of work. 

• Sports: Die hard sports fan, especially my local Blue Jays and Maple Leafs. As a true Toronto fan, I am destined to be chronically and simultaneously optimistic and disappointed. Trying to diversify into a couple of new sports right now - just joined a bowling league (if you don’t think bowling is a sport, then how do you explain how sweaty I get? 😀)
• AI: Around 2014 I picked up the book Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, which changed forever how I thought about the world and what is possible. Amazingly some of his boldest predictions have already come true - especially given the advancements we’re seeing with GPT and Dall-E. I read and listen to everything I can find about AI and even do some tinkering on the side.
• Gardening: my dad has always been an avid gardener, and when I finally got my first backyard I found myself following in his footsteps. We get a ton of sun so I try to grow as many veggies as I can. Photo below of my most successful broccoli plant! 

Professional journey

Share a little more about what you were doing professionally or educationally before joining the team. 

• I started out studying computer engineering at the University of Maryland, but very quickly realized I was much too extraverted for a full time developer job - I needed more time with people. I started out in project management at a large civil engineering firm. My favourite part of the job was working with the customer, and eventually decided to try sales. I loved it and have worked in sales ever since.

Pro-tip: use the “one line deeper” rule

When describing these areas, always try to follow the “one line deeper” rule. This rule nudges you to always add at least one additional sentence which adds context or colour to the information you are sharing. See the chart below for some examples.

Example 1: Hockey Fan

• Simple: Hockey fan

• One-line deeper: Diehard hockey fan - varsity defenseman in a past life, chronically disappointed fan of the Montreal Canadians in the current life

Example 2: Jazz Lover

• Simple: Jazz lover

• One-line deeper: Jazz lover, especially the classic American songbook. Still working my way up to the avant garde stuff. Oscar Peterson is my hero.

Example 3: Dog Parent

• Simple: Dog parent of a golden retriever named Casey

• One-line deeper: Dog parent of a golden retriever named Casey. Got him during the pandemic and we bonded over daily social distance walks. Here’s a photo of him on his birthday.  

Optional Ideas

• Quirky fact. Share something quirky about you or your life that will spark surprise and conversation with peers. "I can repeat, move-for-move, the entire dance routine to Michael Jackson’s Bad. My friends and I learned it over a weekend in high school, and it is forever burned in my memory."
• ‍Personal user manual. Suggestions about what you need to do your best work, and how to best work with you. See this detailed summary of the personal user manual created by Atlassian (external link).
• ‍Personality test results. Results of Myers-Briggs, DiSC Assessments, Enneagram and other related tests can help others get to know you and understand how to best work with you. Read more about Myers-Briggs, DiSC Assessments, or the Enneagram.  

Best practices when setting up an employee blog ritual for your team

Avoid the blank page

‍Provide a new hire with a sample template, structure or sample content to include in their blog to prevent paralysis and anxiety that comes with starting with a blank page. (Easy win - start by sharing this blog post!)

Provide team member reference points

One of the first questions most new hires ask when they sit down to write their intro blog is, “what does everyone else say?”. To address this question, provide real examples from coworkers which can act as a reference point for what is “normal” at the company. The goal isn’t conformity, but to give the new hire peace of mind that they aren’t saying anything way out of line with the company culture, values or norms. 

Share it in the right place

If most company activity happens on Slack or Teams, don’t send the blog via email or stick it in an HRIS company directory, where no one will find or read it. Ideally, make finding existing employees’ blogs easy as well, so that new employees can get the benefit of the time their coworkers invested in introducing themselves when they first joined.

Get the audience right

In a smaller company, a single Slack or Teams channel to welcome new hires may be the perfect venue to share new blogs. But at a large, geographically dispersed organization, having a single channel to share all employee blogs can be counterproductive:  new employees will be daunted by the audience size (and as a result, share less), and existing employees will ignore the channel, as it involves introductions from team members they will never interact with. In these cases, create smaller channels, based on teams, functions or geographies, where new hires can share their blogs with a more relevant audience. 

Get the vulnerability level right

A new hire is usually writing their blog during their first week on the job. They haven’t yet had time to build the trust needed to share more vulnerable parts of their personal story (and some folks will never feel comfortable sharing these aspects of themselves at work, which is also totally normal). Understanding this, be sure to set expectations with new hires that the information you are hoping they will include is relatively superficial and not meant to be a deep dive into the more sensitive details of their life story, unless they’d like to share those things out the gate. 

Make it asynchronous

As the world moves to more remote and hybrid work, as well as more distributed teams working across time zones, everyone is feeling the challenge of meeting overload. While live interactions (whether in person or remotely) are crucial for new hires to build relationships with their peers, making this first introduction asynchronous - via a written blog, or recorded video - allows the employee’s introduction to scale without requiring everyone in the organization to join another meeting. This also has the benefit of enabling those less comfortable with public speaking tell their story without the dread of feeling “on stage” in front of a large group of people.

Make it interactive

se a platform that allows teammates to engage with and react to the blog, such as by adding comments and emojis. Creating a space for reciprocal sharing drives emotional contagion and creates a natural platform for coworkers to reach out to new hires and connect over shared interests.

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(Shameless plug - Welcomepage makes it easy to create an intro blog that has all of these things, and more!)

Employee Blog vs. Life Story Exercise

The Employee Blog is often confused with another related exercise - the Life Story.

The Life Story is an exercise where an employee spends up to 5 minutes telling their life story to their co-workers, as a way to help teammates get to know each other and build empathy for each other’s perspectives.

On the surface, the Employee Blog may sound like an asynchronous version of this exercise. On a closer look, the exercises are very different, and it is worth clarifying those differences here.

Here are some of the key ways a life story differs from an employee blog:

Depth of sharing

A Life Story often (depending on the employee’s comfort level) explores life milestones that can be closer to the heart, such as important accomplishments or moments of hardship and loss. An Employee Blog shares more surface level details.

Tenure of team member

A Life Story exercise usually involves employees who have already worked at the company for at least 1 - 2 months (and often much longer), and have already had a chance to build trust with their colleagues. An employee usually has to cross this time threshold to feel comfortable sharing more personal aspects of their life story with their team.

Size and composition of group

A Life Story exercise is a moment of shared vulnerability, designed for a smaller team that works frequently together. In contrast, an Employee Blog is a more lighthearted introduction designed to be shared with a larger, less tightly-knit group.

Ephemerality

A Life Story is usually shared live and synchronously in an unrecorded discussion, to create a moment of shared vulnerability that is informal and safe. In contrast, the Employee Blog is an asynchronous exercise designed to scale and be recorded in order to be shared widely. 

In short, both exercises are important, but exist for different points in the employee journey. The Employee Blog is a lighthearted introduction to the new employee, meant for the whole organization or the large group of stakeholders that the new hire works with. The Life Story is a team bonding exercise, designed for a more settled employee and a smaller, more tightly-knit team. 

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