Employee Spotlight Questions

An employee spotlight is a powerful tool for employee engagement, retention, and recruiting. Organizations can use these spotlights to increase employee satisfaction and loyalty, promote their company's culture and values, and attract top talent. Meanwhile, employee spotlights also provide an opportunity for employees to share their employee experience and feel recognized and appreciated for their great work at your company. If you’re looking to develop employee spotlight questions within your organization, follow the guidelines below.
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What Is an Employee Spotlight?

Employee spotlights are a great way to share your employees’ stories via content that you publish on your internal communication channels, your company’s social media pages, career sites, and other channels. These posts may include everything from an employee’s work history and achievements to personal hobbies and interests.  

Employee spotlight posts act as an in-person interview strategy and are an excellent way of building connections among employees, boosting your corporate and employer brand, and providing a platform for employees to share their stories authentically. Employers can use employee spotlight posts as a way to showcase their employees and give them a voice in the workplace, while also creating a sense of community within an organization by allowing employees to share what they do on a daily basis.

An employee spotlight interview can also help foster a relationship between workers with a recently promoted supervisor, a great colleague, or your company's leadership team. This system may significantly improve your employee retention rate.

While employee spotlights share some similarities to customer testimonials, they differ from them in that employee spotlights focus on the employee experience and what it’s like to work within your organization. For example, employee spotlight posts may serve to highlight your company culture, core values, training opportunities, and efforts to support individuals’ goals.
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How to Create Employee Spotlight Questions

Employee spotlight questions are a great way to get to know the people in your company and delve into their experiences as employees. They are also a great way to highlight the accomplishments of employees in a way that's meaningful for them. This type of employee engagement is critical to creating a satisfied workforce and can directly impact your bottom line through improved retention, increased productivity, reduced absenteeism, and other drivers of success.

When creating your questions for employee spotlight, keep in mind that open-ended questions will produce the most insightful responses. While it’s important to discuss employees’ skills, accomplishments, and responsibilities, don’t stop there. The goal is to create employee spotlight questions that help you learn more about how they work and what motivates them.
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Employee Spotlight Questions Examples

The following employee spotlight questions are a good starting point for a comprehensive questionnaire that will get your employees excited to contribute. They range from professional to fun, giving employees ample opportunities to share information about themselves that others might not already know:
1. What is your favorite part of working at our company?
2. What do you like most about the work we do here?
3. What are you most proud of in your career so far?
4. How would you describe your company culture?
5. What's one thing people don't know about you that they would be surprised to find out?
6. What is the most interesting project you've worked on here?
7. What piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
8. How long have you been with the company?
9. How has your role evolved over time since you’ve been here?
10. What do you think makes our team culture unique?
11. If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
12. How did you get started in the industry?
13. What are your goals for the next few months/years?
14. What is one thing that you wish people knew about your job?
15. If you had three wishes, what would they be?
16. What do you enjoy most about working here?
17. What’s one thing that surprised you about your current role?
18. What’s the last song you listened to?
19. What, if anything, are you currently binge-watching? Or reading?
20. What’s one thing on your bucket list?

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Feel free to get creative and add to this list of employee spotlight questions as well as tailor them to the specific employee. You can always leave out answers from the employee spotlight if you don’t have enough space to cover every answer, but it’s better to have too much information than not enough when it comes time to create the spotlight.
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Internal Employee Spotlight Best Practices

Undoubtedly, internal employee spotlights can help you strengthen relationships with your employees and build rapport with customers, job candidates, and other stakeholders. Before you start shooting videos or writing posts, however, review the following employee spotlight best practices:

• Determine the best format for your employee spotlights. Videos and podcasts are great for engaging audiences that would rather listen to your content than read it. You can then repurpose this content into blog posts and social media posts, allowing your content to get extra mileage.
• Choose an employee to spotlight. Ideally, select people from different departments throughout the company and with varying levels of experience. Ask if they want to participate before sending a list of questions, making it clear that it’s optional.
• Be flexible as you interview. Don’t be afraid to stray from your list of questions if the conversation goes in an unexpected direction, but also, do your best to keep the interview on track.
• Once you’ve created your employee spotlight, promote it through your internal channels as well as externally on your blog, social media pages, and other mediums.
• Employee spotlights published on your company's website or social media platforms are also powerful on their own. Posting them on social media where they can be viewed and commented on by both staff members and potential customers give the positive impression of having a great business culture.
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5 Top Employee Spotlight Examples

1. Delta

Delta uses its @lifeatdelta Instagram account to share the employee experience throughout the airlines, from flight attendants to ground crews. One post spotlighted a flight attendant for Asian American Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, providing details about her experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion at the company. Sharing such stories is not only beneficial for boosting employee engagement but also overall engagement on social media [1].
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd_GWWPrHaq/

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2. E.J. Gallo Winery

Similarly, E.J. Gallo Winery spotlights employees via its @lifeatgallo Instagram account. This post features an employee who learned about the winery during her senior year of college and went on to join its Sales Leadership Development Program, giving people a glimpse of what it’s like to work from the ground up.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CdyNn2vFVcW/

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3. Pinnacle

Information technology solutions provider Pinnacle features employees on its ‘Get to Know Our Team’ page. Here, you can see the simple Q&A style focuses mainly on questions of a more personal nature, such as “What is your go-to karaoke song” and “Who job did you have in high school?” — making it a fun, engaging read.
https://www.pbsnow.com/pinnacle-news/employee-spotlight-jason-doll/
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4. Commit Global

Translation and language services provider Commit Global features employee spotlights on its blog, with a written interview that’s paired with audio. Lifestyle photos like the one below offer a glimpse into the employee’s life outside of work.
https://commit-global.com/employee-spotlight-effie-salourou/
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5. TC Acoustic

Audio Distributor TC Acoustic took a unique approach to staff spotlight questions by letting an employee “take over” its social media account for the day after the company became Great Place to Work certified. “This is the story of my part-time job that I never resigned from…” and the rest is TC Acoustic history.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ0xVP3FNMw/
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Conclusion

‍The benefits of Employee Spotlights are clear: they help you attract prospective employees as well as keep your current employees engaged and feeling appreciated [2]. They also showcase the employee experience, in turn, building trust and connection with the rest of the team and encouraging others to take pride in their work. Overall, employee spotlights help foster a sense of community, which can lead to better business practices and morale overall. In other words, it's a win-win for all parties involved.

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[1] https://neilpatel.com/blog/employee-spotlights/
[2] https://www.comparably.com/news/why-spotlighting-your-employees-matters/