Stories Incorporated shares the steps to an innovative and effective employee engagement strategy: storytelling. This is an excerpt from our comprehensive download, The Complete Guide to Organizational Storytelling.

Chief People Officers and employee engagement experts possess an essential mission: develop the culture and its people. Organizational storytelling offers a not-so-secret weapon to cultivate employee engagement that lasts. In an organizational storytelling approach, you’ll have tons of real stories to fuel your employee engagement strategy. These stories will bring your values to life so they really stick. 

The cycle of employee engagement and stories 

In fact, employee engagement isn’t just a strategy. It’s also a cycle:

• Employees chosen as storytellers are reminded of why they stay during a facilitated and impactful interview process.
  • Selection as a featured employee storyteller also serves as an innovative employee recognition, rewards and engagement activity.

• The employees’ stories shared can now be tied to company values, reinforcing and grounding them in real employee experiences. 
  • When converted into engaging media, these employee stories now serve as the most compelling proofs of culture.

• This organizational storytelling media is launched internally, and the employee storytellers’ colleagues are reminded of organizational purpose.
  • Team members reconnect with the cultural values and why they stay, thanks to specific examples from their colleagues’ stories. 

• Employees are likely to mirror similar behavior when they see what is celebrated and tied to specific values in their workplace. 
  • More positive experiences generate more employee stories!

Of course, the cycle’s impact isn’t limited to employee engagement and internal communications. It extends to recruiting great-fit candidates, too.

• When organizational storytelling content is launched externally, candidates how relate to the culture are drawn to take the next step.
• Active candidates learn from employees’ stories so, upon joining the team, cultural expectations are set and met. 
• When those candidates become employees and have their own experiences, they’re eager to share their own stories. 

… and the cycle repeats!

Launching and Reinforcing Values 

Creating and reinforcing values are one of the most talked about and universally accepted business practices out there. But in reality, core values are often not very well launched or reinforced internally with employees and externally with candidates. Some employees don’t even know what the values are, even though they’ve worked at your company for years! Others might know the words, but they draw a blank when asked for supporting examples in their workplace. 

Organizational storytelling will help you redefine, reinforce and constantly promote your values internally and externally. One of its biggest opportunities is to help culture stewards bring their values to life for employees and candidates. 

In this example, an employee story brings to life the company’s LOVE value.

And, in this example, employee stories speak to all of the CARFAX core values. 

With an organizational storytelling approach, tons of real employee examples are generated. Those stories can be isolated or woven together to bring your values to life so they really stick.

Learn more ways to increase employee engagement and candidate attraction in our complete guide to organizational storytelling!