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purleweA reader writes on Ask a Manager:
I’ve started a new job (thanks to lots of great advice on negotiating job offers from your site!) which involves a lot of networking with partners within and outside of my organization, and because I’m new I’m meeting people for the first time. In preparation for a scheduled meeting, I try to do some research on the company and the work my contact does, so that I can make the most of our meeting time. Because of Covid, all my meetings are now virtual, usually via video conference, but hopefully some day I’ll be meeting people in person.
A couple weeks ago, I had a situation that really threw me for a loop and I can’t stop stewing about it. I’d done a lot of research and reading about the individual I was meeting with, and there happened to be a few photos of the person on their organization’s website (I am talking about the company website, not social media or broader web-stalking).
When the meeting started (we were both working from home), the person looked nothing like their photos, to the point where I started to have a mini-panic and thought I’d prepared for the wrong meeting or somehow was meeting with the wrong person. I slowly realized that I was talking with the same person, but that their physical appearance and attire choice had changed quite a bit. It was distracting — thinking I’d made a mistake and trying to dig through my memory to make sure I was in the right meeting — and the situation made it hard to focus on the conversation at hand.
So that started me thinking about whether there’s any etiquette or general guidance for how often you should be updating your “official” online presence photos, if they exist. On one hand, I feel like if you’re going to put something out there, it should be reasonably true to what you look like and not overly edited or really out of date … but on the other hand, some things are ephemeral (like hair color/style, facial hair on men, even some weight gain/loss) and you don’t always want to be updating every time you get a haircut or grow a mustache. Also, in some circumstances, I could see a situation where a physical change is happening (like a gender transition) where someone isn’t ready to make it “website official.”
What’s that the right thing to do here from an individual level, but also from a managerial level if you oversee staff who who have official photos on company websites? I’m certainly not going to bring up to a fellow networking contact that I think they should update their online presence, but now I want to make sure I’m not putting someone else in a position where they don’t recognize me!
Well, there’s what people should do and then there’s how the people around them should respond to it, and those can be two different things.
As a general rule, you should indeed want your online photos to look reasonably enough like yourself that people won’t panic and think they’re meeting with the wrong person.
And that’s a guideline with a lot of room in it! It doesn’t mean people need to update their photo every year or when their hair changes or every time they go up or down 10 pounds. It really just means “be generally recognizable” (since otherwise, what’s the point of having the photo up at all?).
But as a manager, I’d tread pretty lightly around telling people when they need an updated photo. I could see saying something like, “I just realized our photo of you on the website is from when you first started 15 years ago — can we get a more recent one at some point?” But if it’s a photo from within, say, five or even ten years and the person looks different because they’ve gained/lost weight or gone bald or similar … I’d leave it alone. I just don’t think it matters enough to be worth putting such a focus on the person’s appearance, particularly when those changes can be sensitive areas. Unless there’s evidence that it’s regularly confusing people in ways that matter (something like students not recognizing an assigned teacher), I’d put more weight on giving people the comfort of managing their own online photos.
I’ve started a new job (thanks to lots of great advice on negotiating job offers from your site!) which involves a lot of networking with partners within and outside of my organization, and because I’m new I’m meeting people for the first time. In preparation for a scheduled meeting, I try to do some research on the company and the work my contact does, so that I can make the most of our meeting time. Because of Covid, all my meetings are now virtual, usually via video conference, but hopefully some day I’ll be meeting people in person.
A couple weeks ago, I had a situation that really threw me for a loop and I can’t stop stewing about it. I’d done a lot of research and reading about the individual I was meeting with, and there happened to be a few photos of the person on their organization’s website (I am talking about the company website, not social media or broader web-stalking).
When the meeting started (we were both working from home), the person looked nothing like their photos, to the point where I started to have a mini-panic and thought I’d prepared for the wrong meeting or somehow was meeting with the wrong person. I slowly realized that I was talking with the same person, but that their physical appearance and attire choice had changed quite a bit. It was distracting — thinking I’d made a mistake and trying to dig through my memory to make sure I was in the right meeting — and the situation made it hard to focus on the conversation at hand.
So that started me thinking about whether there’s any etiquette or general guidance for how often you should be updating your “official” online presence photos, if they exist. On one hand, I feel like if you’re going to put something out there, it should be reasonably true to what you look like and not overly edited or really out of date … but on the other hand, some things are ephemeral (like hair color/style, facial hair on men, even some weight gain/loss) and you don’t always want to be updating every time you get a haircut or grow a mustache. Also, in some circumstances, I could see a situation where a physical change is happening (like a gender transition) where someone isn’t ready to make it “website official.”
What’s that the right thing to do here from an individual level, but also from a managerial level if you oversee staff who who have official photos on company websites? I’m certainly not going to bring up to a fellow networking contact that I think they should update their online presence, but now I want to make sure I’m not putting someone else in a position where they don’t recognize me!
Well, there’s what people should do and then there’s how the people around them should respond to it, and those can be two different things.
As a general rule, you should indeed want your online photos to look reasonably enough like yourself that people won’t panic and think they’re meeting with the wrong person.
And that’s a guideline with a lot of room in it! It doesn’t mean people need to update their photo every year or when their hair changes or every time they go up or down 10 pounds. It really just means “be generally recognizable” (since otherwise, what’s the point of having the photo up at all?).
But as a manager, I’d tread pretty lightly around telling people when they need an updated photo. I could see saying something like, “I just realized our photo of you on the website is from when you first started 15 years ago — can we get a more recent one at some point?” But if it’s a photo from within, say, five or even ten years and the person looks different because they’ve gained/lost weight or gone bald or similar … I’d leave it alone. I just don’t think it matters enough to be worth putting such a focus on the person’s appearance, particularly when those changes can be sensitive areas. Unless there’s evidence that it’s regularly confusing people in ways that matter (something like students not recognizing an assigned teacher), I’d put more weight on giving people the comfort of managing their own online photos.
