How To Strategically Tell Stories That Sells Your Company’s Vision And Boosts Employee Engagement

Would you love to hear a story? I am sure a “yes” immediately popped into your mind. Don’t worry; there is nothing wrong with wanting to hear a story, naturally, humans are inquisitive, and stories normally promise an exciting engaging experience.

Equally important to developing a great vision for a company is how the company effectively communicates its vision to its employees.

Here is where the art and skill of storytelling become vital. If done properly, storytelling can be a powerful positive catalyst for employee engagement and drive for transformational change.

Many company leaders tell stories that project them and their companies as drivers of change instead of talking about their competition.

Having that in mind, storytelling especially about a company’s vision can bolster engagement with employees at your company. Unlike other storytelling, corporate storytelling is not for entertainment or marketing but educational and informative purposes.

All organizations use storytelling for certain purposes. Some for marketing, others for training, or even for inspiration of employees.

Storytelling can be used to talk about a certain product or service to your clients and employees, it can be used to create work scenarios during training, or to create more engagement among management and employees.

Storytelling can help create clarity, motivation and inspiration for employees as they gear towards achieving the company’s vision. When employees get to hear about the company’s vision in form of storytelling, it tends to stick better.

For millions of years now, people have been telling stories especially about themselves, and it has contributed largely to their growth, there is nothing new about it, right?

So, would you like to tell a story about your company’s vision? It opens the doors to growth in your company. Here are five benefits of storytelling your company’s vision:

• Employees will embrace and support the company’s vision.
• Promote a healthier work culture
• Employees are engaged and informed
• Loyal and devoted employees
• A clearer picture of the journey so far
• Better relationships among employees

Now that we have established the benefits of telling stories about your company’s vision, you need to know how to tell such stories.

Sharing stories about your vision can be boring sometimes and will not bring the desired engagement which is why you need to tell your vision story strategically. A strategic story contains:

A strong sense of a plot:

Your vision story should provide listeners with a sense that the organization is going somewhere exciting. Even if they know the vision already, keep them wondering how it started. That way your employees will pay great attention to your story and relate to it.

Definite call to action:

Just like in marketing, such stories should have exactly what you want your employees to do. They should be able to align the vision with their vision, employees after listening to your vision story should proudly be able to say “I know what to do in my area because it fits with my values and where we are going.”

Consistent different versions:

Each time you tell them your company’s vision story, it should have different versions to suit the specific individual you are sharing the story with. For every employee that hears the story, it should motivate them to make certain decisions. The stories should be different but the vision consistent.

Inevitable:

At the end of your story, your listeners should leave thinking “it had to happen that way.” Meaning it is applied and connected with the current stage of the company. Do not share stories that promote a different vision from the beginning and something else at the end or different from what is done in the company.

According to Diane Seffner, "Stories don't just inspire. They also provide vicarious experiences where people can 'try on' new ways of acting and responding".

In the corporate world today, employees are no longer just passive listeners but as you explain new policies, procedures, products, or ideas they want to be part of it and experience it with you.

Telling corporate stories can help in providing active learning opportunities in a non-threatening environment, and telling your company’s vision to your employees can help them immerse properly in the vision and adopt them as their own while working on achieving these visions as a team.

The more employees hear about your company’s vision and stories of how that vision is creating value in the lives of real people in the real world and engage with them, they will feel more invested in the company and its vision, which can only benefit the company as a whole.

Companies that are intentional about transformational change in their organizations must be able to create stories by putting facts into an emotional context.

They should be able to use their vision stories to motivate hundreds or thousands of employees to achieve more than they thought possible, just as the vision drove them into the development of the company. And unlike other ways of influence, like persuasion, bribery, or charismatic appeal which are all push strategies, storytelling is a pull strategy, it drags employee’s attention, and allow individuals to decide for themselves, which is one of the great hallmarks of effective influence.

Conclusion

Research has shown that showing how our visions are expressed is more effective than simply stating them. When employees see and read the vision statement, it sounds more persuasive and a rule to guide their activities but when they hear stories about how that vision in transforming the lives of real people in the real world, they are more likely to key into the vision, align their vision with the firm’s and also dedicate themselves to the firm.

Employees are more likely to stay loyal to companies that see the need to talk about their vision more lightly with real-life experience than those they cannot relate to.

P.S: at Advance the Employee, we help businesses tell stories about their corporate vision and mission to their employees. We find, craft and tell these stories to your team members and get it delivered to their inboxes on a biweekly basis. These stories usually feature real instances of people gleaning value from your product/service. Employees who are regularly shown and told stories about the value and importance of their work and how it is impacting lives are much more likely to be loyal to a business and its cause, and to be motivated to do much more

P.S: to learn more about what we do and how we can help your firm, please fill out this client info form, or send an email to info@advancetheemployee.com and someone from our team will reach out to you.

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