Your organization’s stories matter now more than ever

By Elizabeth Williams ABC, FRSA

Elizabeth Williams highlights how communicators can help keep the workplace culture alive and flourishing during these uncertain times with the help of stories.

New ways of working have exacted a few things from the workplace, including the casual (and not-so-casual) telling of stories. From sharing the details of a family birthday while you warm up your lunch to swapping tales in a planning meeting, stories are a key communication tool for employees and managers alike.

Even as we begin to imagine a return to the workplace, leaders must confront an altered cultural landscape. In the early weeks of the pandemic, more than three-quarters of Canadian workers said they didn’t expect their corporate culture to return to pre-COVID norms; at the same time, trust in executives fell 12 percent. Though later studies showed a small rebound in employee satisfaction and engagement, it’s clear we need to be careful about assumptions regarding a return to pre-pandemic life.

Hello, stories

Stories offer our stressed workforce a way to understand what’s happened, along with a framework from which to build shared meaning and alignment.

Humans have been telling each other stories for 100,000 years, and in organizations they do five things exceptionally well:

• Build trust
• Support shared purpose
• Define and reinforce values
• Define and illustrate culture
• Build employer and market brands

For example, Loblaw Companies CEO, Galen Weston, shares a story about a customer who gave employees at one of their supermarkets each a handwritten card and $40 to thank them for coming to work. The employees pooled their cash and bought groceries for local seniors. The company is using this story to reinforce and illustrate its purpose of Helping Canadians Live Well.

All organizations have a collective narrative, including stories around its founding or origins, key milestones, favourite customer stories, awards, achievements and even stories that can be used to warn against risks or unacceptable behaviours.

Stories for an unusual time

Customer and employee reviews can contribute stories to the narrative, and even gossip and rumours often take the form of storytelling. In ordinary times, story-driven organizations should be cultivating and sharing the stories that can create cultural cohesion, bring values to life, and help align employees around a shared purpose.

But these aren’t ordinary times, so we need to look at other types of stories to help employees and customers make sense of individual and collective experiences during the pandemic. Now is the time to start looking for and documenting different types of pandemic stories, including those about:

• Helping
• Surviving
• Adapting
• Reinventing
• Caring
• Thriving
• Emerging
• Recovering
• Creating

The stories your leaders, employees and customers are starting to share now will define your employer and market brand for years to come. For many organizations, those stories will talk about resilience, community and teamwork, but for some they could include harsher realities such as layoffs, mental wellness challenges or controversial decisions.

Start with leader stories

Now is the time to start gathering the pandemic stories your organization will take into the future. How did your people face down the pandemic? How did they help customers?

What successes did you find in the midst of uncertainty? Did your organization give back to the community? What changes were made that are likely to persist for the long term?

A good place to start your story gathering is with your leadership team. What are they proudest of from the pandemic experience? What would they do differently? Who inspired them through a difficult year? What struggles did they face as leaders? Working with the leadership team to help them find and craft these important stories will be key to helping them define the post-pandemic culture.

In early 2021 it’s equally important to listen carefully to the stories your employees are sharing. Not all of them are going to be positive, but they are all an important part of understanding shared and individual experiences and assessing the impact of new ways of working.

Start with a virtual listening tour for your leaders. Some of our clients are using the simple stop-start-keep framework to guide the discussion and take away actionable ideas and shareable stories.