UNSPOKEN AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS OFTEN LIE BEHIND LOW employee engagement Scores.
Employees need to understand the organisation's purpose. They need to believe the organisation adds real value for the people it serves. And they need to feel intrinsic to the organisation's mission. Therefore, employees need to understand how their team's work and their own work matters.
Employees also need to feel seen, valued, recognised, rewarded. And, they need to know where they are going within the organisation. Crucially, employees need to feel that they belong.
Below are some unspoken employee questions that we have discovered in conversations with executives across dozens of businesses and organisations.
01
Why does the organisation's work matter?
02
Why does our team's work matter?
03
Why does my day-to-day work matter?
04
Who values me and what is the next step for me?
We can help you to address these big questions and the smaller questions to build your employee engagement.
Employee ENGAGEMENT
HOW WE WORK WITH YOU TO IMPROVE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
STEP 1
EXPLORE LIVED EXPERIENCES
Although employee engagement is often measured with scoring systems, engagement is driven by 'felt' experience. We start by listening to the stories employees tell us as well as — reviewing surveys to surface what people are actually experiencing. We aim to uncover the big and small unspoken questions to understand what matters to them. We look for factors that affect how employees feel and that shape their engagement. Improving employee engagement is all about making employees feel more inspired and enthusiastic about the organisation, their team, their own work which in turn boosts the performance of your organisation.
STEP 2
ILLUMINATE ROOT CAUSES
We look for common themes in employee stories to understand where they feel they are in the dark. We identify their needs and the communication changes that can lead to the greatest improvements in employee engagement. We help you to understand where to shine a light so that employees fully understand and feel connected to the organisation's mission and values. We help you to craft the stories in which employees can see themselves.
STEP 2
Transform Through Communications and Training
We take the findings and make recommendations on how we can help you to boost employee communication. We support you in either or both of two significant ways. Drawing on our story development approach, we can enable you to enrich employee emgagement. Drawing on our learning programmes, we can train your leaders to communicate in a way that boosts employee engagement. We help you to connect people upwards, downwards and across the organisational matrix, to boost engagement, impact and outcomes.
six places we look to Boost engagement
A structured way of finding out where engagement is leaking — and what's really driving it.
1
Strategic Stories
Strategy is often delivered as conceptual pillars on slides. While these decks often look impressive, even the most senior leaders struggle to make these communications real and inspiring for employees. Strategy needs to be made real through compelling stories.
2
CULTURE Stories
Values often apprear in wall posters or get shared in corporate videos. Yet, most employees don't remember values without referring to a slide deck. To build culture, values need to be embedded in employee's minds and hearts through meaningful storytelling and lived day-by-day.
3
Change Stories
Change is often met with resistance underpinned by fear of the unknown. To make change happen smoothly, employee perspectives need to be acknowledged and understood Change needs to be communicated with a story that takes employees on a journey and lands them safely in a new place.
4
Leadership Storytelling
Leaders need to become adept at crafting and telling engaging stories. These are not necessarily stories about themselves but about the organisation's and strategy, culture and change and the team's mission and activity. Leadership stories need to inspire and motivate employees. Story crafting and telling are unique skills that needs to be learned, practised and developed.
5
INFLUENCE Storytelling
Peers often need to engage, inspire and influence each other. While, communications to be logical and make sense, they also need to be felt by our audience and therefore need to engage emotionally. Understanding others perspectives enables you to craft and tell stories that are meaningful to others. Having others feel the impact of your story is intrinsic to influence.
6
INSIGHT STORytelling
Dozens of decisons are made in your organisation every day. Frustratingly, however, less urgent decisions are often deferred. Why? Decision-making requires judgment which has an emotional and a rational component. So data alone might not be sufficient to move others towards a decision. Insightful storytelling with data can bridge the gap and lead to faster decisions and actions.
Your strategy is sound, but nobody can retell it. Frustrated?
We build employee engagement by turning business strategy into a story people remember, repeat and act on - from board narrative to team workshops.
WHAT STORYTELLING DELIVERS FOR employee ENGAGEMENT
We support you in translating a complex business or organisational mission, strategy and values into human stories. Powerful, well-crafted, meaningful stories enable you to engage, inspire and move employees and build culture within your organisation. The result is a highly connected, motivated workforce aligned to common organisational goals which can in turn boost business performance.
knowing the strategy
Strategy lives
Memorable narratives bring strategy to life such that employees feel the impact and want be part of the orgsanisation's mission.
implementing the strategy
Teams Align
When teams align around a unified purpose and have absolute clarity why their work matters and their daily priorities, they can accelerate the right actions.
greater loyalty
employees stay
When employees know and love where the orgsanisation is going and have a sense of belonging, value and direction, they are more likely to stay.
living the values
CULTURE CHANGEs
When the strategy and values are cascaded so well that they are alive within every person in the organisation, culture naturally evolves.
Our unique Approach
Our approach to storytelling builds upon a decade of experience with storytelling in business.
We draw on our own learning in the fields of storytelling, psychology and neuroscience combined with our decades of experience in leadership, strategy and communications and presenting to audiences.
We also bring our experience with data, research, technology and design which are integral to story discovery, crafting, production and telling.
THE LATEST ARTICLES FROM OUR BLOG TO HELP YOU BECOME A BETTER STORYTELLER
A selection OF our wonderful clients
We have delivered storytelling and/or visualisation training or crafted stories and developed visual presentations for these clients. Some clients have benefitted from both our unique learning and creative services
