The short version: pick the room early, put everyone on a fixed schedule, decide the look once for the whole company, and tell people what to wear a week ahead with one reminder the day before. A company headshot day runs on logistics far more than on photography. When the planning is done, the session itself is the easy part.
This guide is for whoever has been handed the job of organizing it, usually someone in HR, marketing or the office manager's seat, and it follows the order you will actually need it in.
Pick the room first
Almost any office has a room that works, but some work much better than others. The most important thing is length. Flattering headshots want real distance between the camera and the person, and between the person and whatever is behind them, so a long conference room beats a square one even when the square one is bigger. A conference table takes up more of that space than you would think, and we often end up working on a diagonal into a corner to find the longest sight line the room has.
Windows and overhead lights are less of a worry than people expect, because we bring our own lighting and control the room rather than working with what is there. What helps us most is knowing about the room in advance: roughly how big it is, where the windows are, and whether the table can be moved. A couple of phone photos of it save a lot of guessing.
Book the room for the whole day, including time before the first session and after the last. Check two practical things while you are at it: whether your building needs a certificate of insurance from outside vendors, and where we should park and bring equipment in. Both are easy to sort out a week ahead and awkward to sort out on the morning.
Build a fixed schedule
The single biggest difference between a smooth headshot day and a chaotic one is a schedule. "Drop by when you are free" sounds flexible, but it produces a queue at ten in the morning, an empty room at two, and a handful of people who never come at all. Give everyone a named time slot instead, and send it as a calendar invite so it lands next to their other meetings.
Leave a gap before the first slot for us to build and test the setup. Group people by team or by floor so the room fills and empties in an orderly way. If anyone needs a longer sitting, such as leadership portraits for press or a speaker bio, give them their own block rather than squeezing them between the standard slots. Ask us for the slot length when you book, since it depends on the size of the group and the mix of sittings, and add a short buffer near the end for the people who were out sick or stuck on a call.
Someone will always miss the day. Plan for it rather than hoping against it: new hires and absentees can be photographed on a short return visit, matched to the set you already have.
Decide the look once
A team page reads as one company when every portrait shares the same background, lighting and crop. That decision is made at the company level, before anyone sits down, and there are really only two options. You can use your own office as the background, which gives a sense of place and suits most teams, or a plain seamless backdrop, which we bring and light the same way for everybody.
If you already have a set of headshots and want the new ones to match, tell us before the booking rather than after. Send a few examples of the existing set and we will match the background, the lighting direction and the crop as closely as the originals allow. It changes how we set up, so it is much easier to plan for than to fix.
Tell your team, twice
Send the first message about a week out. It should say when and where each person's slot is, roughly how long it takes, what the photos will be used for, and what to wear. Wardrobe is the question people ask most, and a clear answer in advance is what keeps the finished set consistent. We have written a full guide, what to wear for a corporate headshot, which ends with a note you can copy straight into your email.
Then send a short reminder the day before: their time, the room, and a line about arriving a few minutes early. In Phoenix, add one more line about carrying jackets in rather than wearing them across a hot parking lot. That one reminder does more for the day than anything else on this list.
On the day
Have one person on your side who owns the schedule. Their job is simple but valuable: keep an eye on the list, nudge the next person a few minutes before their slot, and swap people around when a meeting overruns. With that in place, the photographers can concentrate on the person in front of the camera, and your team comes through on a schedule rather than waiting around.
A mirror near the room is a small thing that people appreciate, as is somewhere to hang a jacket. Keep the room itself clear of spectators if you can. Most people relax faster without an audience of colleagues watching from the doorway.
After the session
Edited, high resolution files usually come back within a few days, sized for your website, LinkedIn and print, and we agree the delivery date with you when we quote the job. When they arrive, update everything at once: the staff page, LinkedIn profiles, email signatures and any internal directory. A set that goes live together looks deliberate. One that trickles out over three months looks like three different companies.
Finally, keep a note of who was photographed and when. The next new hire will need a headshot that matches, and knowing the date and setup of the original session makes that a quick booking rather than a new project.
Planning a headshot day for your company? Here is how our corporate headshots in Phoenix work, from a two person leadership team to a whole office photographed in one visit.