I always especially appreciate content about storytelling related to employment. While my personal crusade is about storytelling in the job search, I’m also interested in the flip side — how employers use stories to entice, retain, and engage employees. Employee engagement is a major hot-button topic in HR, and some companies are using stories to excellent effect in this quest. One of them is Juniper Networks, reports Martha Finney, who interviewed Juniper’s Stacey Clark Ohara about the organization’s use of storytelling to transmit values. Noting that top-down values programs for employee engagement don’t work, Finney paraphrases Ohara: “It’s the experience of the employees, and the stories they tell about their experiences, that really keep the culture on track, she notes. … ‘we chose storytelling as the best way to inspire, inform and align the organization.’”
For executive stories in particular, Juniper chose video as the storytelling medium. Through Finney, Ohara offered tips to other companies that seek to instill values and engage employees through storytelling:
- Get executives on board. When they are willing to share their experiences through storytelling, others will be more likely to take the risk as well.
- Find the natural storytellers among your employees and recruit them first.
- Give your people time to prepare and rehearse their stories — but not so much that over-rehearsal causes the stories to sound wooden and inauthentic.
- Keep the stories short. [No indication here how short Ohara means, although the next bullet provides a clue.
- Keep the videos shorter. Just a few minutes is all that’s needed to get the main message across.
- Be clear about your purpose. Naturally, you won’t know if you’re successful unless you know what results you’re after. When you’re asking employees to open up and speak from their hearts, they’ll also want to know what the hoped-for outcome will be.
- Start small and build from there. If you’re just initiating this venture in a culture where stories haven’t been typically told, make the initial scope and objectives set as modest as you can. This will keep the process from becoming overwhelmed by overblown expectations.
Qualcomm provides its own spin on “communicate and reinforce the company’s culture and values, disseminate information, identify trends, share attitudes and behaviors, and on-board new employees,” as Tamar Elkeles reports.
Qualcomm’s program, begun five years ago, is called 52 Weeks. Elkeles describes the program:
T
old from the employee perspective, stories provided insights about the company, business decisions, technology milestones, leaders, work teams, employees and products. To make them more personal, stories typically included pictures of the person the story is about or of teams and products referenced.
The 52 Weeks program initially started as a way to communicate company culture and values to new employees. All new hires at Qualcomm were automatically registered on their first day and, for the next year, received a weekly e-mail with a new story submitted by employees or initiated by the employee communications team, which reports to the Qualcomm Learning Center. Since its inception, the 52 Weeks program has expanded and evolved. What began with just an e-mail grew into a 52 Weeks Web site. In addition to new hires, thousands of Qualcomm employees have registered to receive the weekly e-mails and links to the site.
Each story is reviewed before posting by the employee communications editorial committee, which decides if it meets the following criteria:
- Does the story fit into one of the company’s values, such as execution or innovation?
- Does it meet some other organizational goal?
- Is it memorable?
If the 52 Weeks Web site still exists, I can’t find it (perhaps it’s on a company intranet). but you can see a number of the stories from the program in this PDF of a presentation by Elkeles.