Once you start automating people stuff you get into a chain of solutions that are all connected to each other. You've automated your Org Chart. But when you click on a person on the org chart, you want to have a link to the person's biography. Now it's time to go over the perfect Bios platform.

Ideally, there should be a bio set up for each person when they join your organization. And the bio should be automatically deleted when they leave your organization. This is highly connected to the Org Chart solution that we went over previsously.

Clicking on a person on the Org Chart opens a card with more details about the person. And on this card is an icon to go to the person's bio. Go ahead. Try it out below.

This bio is absolutely beautfiul and in the top-right corner is an Org Chart icon which takes you back to the org chart zoomed in on the person and highlighting them.

The old way of doing bios is this. Your manager asks you to make a bio page to share at an upcoming meeting where they will introduce you. What should the medium be? How do you format it? What's the look and feel? What kind of content can you cram onto a single PowerPoint slide? You will show the slide for 30 seconds at the meeting. You will awkwardly stand in front of the slide and talk about yourself for 30 seconds. The people in the room have little chance to get to know you and you're lucky if they remember your name. The bio had little to no impact. And nobody knows where to find it for future reference anyway. The next time you need the bio, you will need to recreate it anyway to match the look and feel of everyone else's. What a waste.

Instead, imagine this. Each new employee is invited to fill in their bio in the platform. Your bio can be as long as short or you like. There are sections prompting you for various subjects. Your name, photo, title and team are standard at the top. But under that, you can decide what sections to fill in. Professional things like where you worked before, where you went to school. And then a mix of funs things like where you grew up, your favorite music, your favorite vacation spot. Share a mix of things about yourself because we are all human and we want to connect. Perhaps someone else shares the same taste in music as you.

Now get this. Anyone can read your bio before actually meeting you. They can get to know you and see common interests. The link to your bio can be included in the agenda for the upcoming meeting so people can read it at their convenience. Then in the meeting, everyone already knows you and someone shouts out "We grew up in the same town!" or "We like the same horror movie!". The ice is broken and the awkwardness is decreased.

Imagine doing this before every meeting with a person in your department. I had a department head who did it. He loved feeling connected to the hundreds of people under him. So when he got on a call with a person he could ask about their family or things on their bucket list. Connection is increased.

First and foremost, the biography platfrom offers a standard template for users. We take care of the formatting. A standard look and feel. So users can then focus on content. Instead of fussing with image sizes and margins they focus on what matters.

Another thing the Bios Platform offers is a common place where all the biographies are located. Instead of each user creating a PowerPoint Slide, or a Word document, or a web page in some random place, the platform centralizes all of the bios in one place. To the point that anyone can find a person's bio and get to know the person BEFORE meeting them for the first time.

The top of every bio is standard. A square photo. The person's name. Email address. The name of their team which can also be linked to the team's SharePoint page. There are links on the right to the org chart. And a pencil to edit the bio. The bio can be edited by the person, their manager, and a platform admin.

The Sections underneath are customizable. We chose to give about 100 possible sections for people to fill in. Some have standard parts. Like the Top 5 strengths section allows the user to pick 5 strengths from drop-down menus.

Similar for the Experience at Company. There's a joined date. Current position. And a description of past positions.

But the "Areas of Expertise" section is really just a blank box for the person to type in anything freely.

Photos

There's one section that is a game-changer for your bio. The Photos section.

No more messing with the size and position of photos. They are presented as a slideshow. Clicking on left and right arrow buttons takes us to the next photo. Photos are automatically sized to fit perfectly. And a caption is placed over the photo. Users can click on a photo in the slideshow and the photo is zoomed in to fill the entire screeen.

What does editing look like? Simple. Just click on the pencil icon and everything becomes editable.

Clicking on the photo prompts you to upload a new photo. Photos are automatically centered and cropped to a square. By default we get your name out of Outlook data, but you can edit those how you like.

The sections below are all arrangeable. Just click and drag them to change the order. If you don't want a section to appear on your bio just untick its checkbox.

Many sections are just empty boxes for the user to freely type in. Others like "Birthday" are specialized with something like just the month and day to select.

The Photos slideshow is really easy to edit. Add a photo and click and drag to change its position. Edit the caption as you wish.

The key is to have a mix of professional and fun things. People ask me what that mix should look like. I say "Just look at what others are doing and match that." But you want to have at least some fun stuff so people can feel like they are connecting with you.

You might also notice some of the text area free-typing boxes say there is a limit of 255 characters. This is because SharePoint can search in data fields for us but only allows searchable text fields to have a maximum of 255 characters. So we could extend this tool and allow us to find, say, all people who grew up in the same town. But something more fluid like "A story about my first job" will likely be longer than 255 characters and not as easily searchable.

The sections

Okay, so here are a list of sections I created. You might choose to start with these and then offer more to your people. You might also choose to allow your people to create their own section titles and go wild. But that's for your company to decide. We decided to keep people inside boundaries. It's up to you how you want to appraoch this.

• StrengthsFinders Top Five
• Experience at Company
• Field of Expertise
• Outside of Company
• LinkedIn
• Birthday
• Education
• Photos
• Something Surprising
• Grew up in
• Languages
• Current Location
• Before Company
• Bucket List
• Diet
• Family
• Famous Person I Met
• Famous Relatives
• Favorite Actor or Actress
• Favorite Band
• Favorite Color
• Favorite Dessert
• Favorite Food
• Favorite Movie or Show
• Favorite Music
• Favorite Vacation Spot
• First Job
• Fitness
• From
• Guilty Pleasure
• Heritage
• Interesting Job
• Joke
• Pets
• Quote
• Random Fact
• Skills
• Sports

Your organization might decide to offer this in a soft way. Encourage people to share without demanding. For example, one organization decided to have small group chats online for people around the world in the department to get to know eachother in groups of 10 people or less. In the invite to the online meeting, it said "Please fill out your own bio and read the bios of other attendees before the chat so we can already know each other and the ice will be broken for our live chat."

Your department could even do a monthly spotlight on an individual. Or perhaps turn it into a fun quiz where you give clues about someone and everyone has to find the person's bio. Or in your monthly department newsletter, don't just give a list of the people who joined your department, but links to their bios. The possibilities are endless. We provide a simple automated tool and people fill in the content.

Conclusion

By providing a Bios platform you are giving your people a way to get to know each other and connect. You could put photos of team members on a team's SharePoint page with links to bios so the business can get to know members of your team. People can share as much or as little as they are comfortable with. Increasing connection among your department members will bring many benefits.