This touches on something that's been discussed a lot over the years, both here on meta and internally within the company. It's a complicated topic; it's got layers. I'll try & cover it fairly here before addressing your specific proposal.
Problem #1: it's confusing to see what appears to be a normal, low-rep user acting in an official capacity
The most frequent complaint is the confusion caused by seeing some user you've never heard of is doing something that only an employee can do: posting announcements on meta with 1 rep, status-tagging bug reports, sharing internal goals or strategies, offering swag giveaways...
It's bad enough that we have a bunch of opinionated jackasses on these sites writing official-sounding answers even when they haven't been hired yet; on top of that there are a bunch of obscure privileges that are attached to an employee status (or even specific team memberships within the company), and yet none of this is visible.
Worse, we recently made the company directory harder to find, thus making it more difficult for a dedicated reader to verify employee status without bookmarking the URL or relying on some sort of userscript.
Problem #2: the only "special user" indicator we have is the moderator diamond
When Stack Overflow was created, there was no difference between "moderator", "employee", and "founder of the company" - so we only really needed one status indicator, the diamond. Even as more employees came online, there still wasn't a need to differentiate between statuses... It wasn't until the first moderators were elected from within the community that there were effective differences in privilege among people with a diamond next to their name... And even then, we tried to minimize what that meant.
But today, there are 300+ employees, and they all have some special privileges even if those amount to nothing more than being able to make edits on meta or view some internal email inbox. Giving them all moderator privileges wouldn't just be a bad security practice, it wouldn't even reflect that original philosophy of equivalence that Jeff was aiming for - depending on the topic, a good many employees may actually know less about how a given community operates than the average member of that site.
Problem #2.b: adding a new "special user" indicator is a non-trivial amount of work.
But what about a different indicator? I've always been partial to ♠ - perhaps we could just toss one of those next to all employee names?
Well... That's still not easy. Users get rendered a lot - the code paths for plopping a username on a page are heavily used and heavily optimized, with lots of denormalization and carefully-tuned lookups... And "is arbitrary user an employee?" isn't a check that's done. We'd have to add new types and new checks throughout the system to enable this without killing performance, so before we go down that road we should think good and hard about whether that's what we actually need... Which brings us to some more problems:
Problem #3: some employees are users too
I came to Stack Overflow to answer programming questions, not to find a job coordinating moderator elections. I signed onto Seasoned Advice to trade tips on making rhubarb meringue pie, not settle arguments or discuss tagging features. As it turned out, I've ended up doing a lot more of the latter than the former these past few years, but I still occasionally enjoy using these sites for the purpose they were designed for. Even when I'm writing here on meta, an awful lot of the time I'm just sharing, like, my opinion as a user - I don't really need or want a conspicuous indicator implying that "THIS IS THE OFFICIAL ANSWER IGNORE ALL OTHERS".
And... I'm not the only one. An awful lot of folks here at the company started as regular users and like to continue to be a part of the sites that brought them here. The features and policies we discuss here on meta affect them just as they affect everyone else - they'd like to be able to contribute to those discussions without feeling like they had to vet their own opinions through some internal gate-keeper first.
Problem #3.b: more employees should probably be users, too
...And even the folks who never used these sites before getting hired should probably be encouraged to at least try answering or asking a question here and there, especially if their job is in some way connected to the design or operation of Q&A - what chef doesn't taste while cooking?
Granted, there are ways to do this without using your Official Employee Account - most sites allow anonymous participation in some form, and there's always the option of using sockpuppet accounts (something we've encouraged community managers to do for years). But, that's extra work and can be awkward at times.
Problem #4: knowing that someone is an employee doesn't mean they're not full of it
I have never fully agreed with anyone at Stack Overflow Inc. about how closing should work. I probably disagree with a fair number of people as to what makes an appropriate edit too. And, as some of you know, I... tend to be pretty free with my opinions.
...Which means there are currently 8+ years worth of very-much-not-official opinions here on meta attached to my employee account.
And that's probably ok... Unless we start making them look too official all of a sudden.
Problem #5: even if I'm the employee directly responsible for the system I'm writing about, I might still not be writing in an "official capacity"
Remember Problem #4? Well... I've also written a whole bunch of answers about how closing works in an official capacity. And those are all just mixed in with the ones where I'm implying that voting to close was the worst idea ever, or that we should replace the gold-badge hammer with some sort of spiked mace.
There's really no substitute for actually reading what I'm writing before deciding if it's legit, and the same goes for everyone else.
Problem #6: employees occasionally escape
I mean, leave. Go on to other jobs with other companies, leaving behind a bunch of official answers attached to accounts that are now very much not employee accounts. Or sometimes just go on to other jobs at this company, with different titles and different responsibilities.
This is a really important factor to keep in mind if, after reading the preceding 5 sections, you're still thinking some sort of special user-card is a good fix.
Ok, all that background crap out of the way, let's look at a few different ideas for solving these problems, including the one in this question I'm supposed to be answering here.
Solutions, technical and otherwise
- Add special symbol to employee names
Replace reputation & badges with employee role
These would go a long way to fix problems #1 & #2, at the cost of making problems #3,4,5 and 6 worse.
Add employee information to the pop-up "hover card"
This potentially avoids some of the cost of implementing this (#2.b), while also keeping the information segregated from the post itself (easing #3-5). OTOH, it also requires readers to hunt it down, particularly an issue on mobile, making it less of a solution to Problem #1.
Encourage employees to put relevant information in their profiles and introduce themselves when posting officially.
This solves ALL of the problems, with the only downsides being that it's a bit noisy and can be hard to remember to do. At some point (say, when you're trying to respond to 100+ people after a new launch), the overhead is just too much to reasonably ask. That said, it's not a bad idea at all for the first few posts from an employee who has never posted on meta before. Here's the guidance I posted on our internal Stack Exchange site:
If you've never posted on the site before, introduce yourself briefly. Something like,
Hi, I'm Shog and my responsibility here at Stack Overflow is washing bottles to prevent the spread of listeria! Now, on to why there's suddenly a "brush" option under every post...
Yes, we're generally not big fans of superfluous greetings and signatures, but in this case it serves a real purpose: letting folks know who you are and why you're providing an official statement even though no one's ever heard of you before.
Fill out your about me section with a few details on what you do here.
Put a link to https://stackoverflow.com/company/team in your "about me" (alternately, use some other official source confirming that you work here). This serves only to satisfy some of our more paranoid users, which may save you an irritating comment exchange on down the line.
Add an employee-only "official statement" option when posting
This is probably my favorite suggestion thus far, since it would require very little effort but still allow fine-grained control over where and when it applies. The actual output could be something like what you suggest (replacing rep/badges with job title) or even something more dramatic (banner / background color), but critically it would only apply to individual posts rather than everything written by every employee everywhere.
