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 © 2016 Edelman
CONNECTIONS
THE COMPANY STORY: FROM SNORE TO SENSATION
Creating a Compelling Narrative That Works for Your People and Your Organization
An Edelman perspective on making meaningful employee connections that deepen engagement, build trustand accelerate business performance
What’s
 a staple of corporate websites, a mainstay of new
 
 hire orientations, and can sometimes be spotted in itsnative habitat, the press release boilerplate? A
company’s
 story, of course. As entertainment business guru Peter Guber said,
“the
 ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial to almost every phase ofenterprise management. It works all along the business food chain.
Company storytelling is ubiquitous and hardworking. When done well, it can bolster customer and employeeengagement, corporate reputation and the bottom line. Here are four steps for crafting a compelling narrativeand getting the most out of it, starting with a
company’s
 first stakeholders: its employees.
Step 1: Inspire
Your corporate story will go nowhere if it transports noone. Like nearly all compelling stories, a strongcorporate narrative tracks to this surefire recipe. It:
 Has a beginning, middle, and end
. IKEA’s founder
Ingvar Kamprad starts a compelling story about his desire to put design within the reach of the masses, then introduces the idea of forming a partnership with customers, and closes explaining the savings realized by bulk buying
 — 
all in a single paragraph.
 Introduces productive tension
by asking “why?”
then gets to the
“what, how, where and when?” Often, the “why?”
comes in the form of a challenge that begs for a hero (this could be your founder or a star product) who can overcome. Watch
Workday’s
video to see
“starting with why” in action.
 Engages at least some of the five senses. Such details make your story memorable and repeatable. Sara Blakely has an indelible story about how she wore the same pair of tight white pants for three years to sell Spanx to department store buyers.
Is unlike any other organization’s story
. Zappos.com, legendary in its devotion to company culture, offers new hires $3,000 to leave
after onboarding if they’re
not a fit. Others have since followed suit, but Zappos has first-
teller’s rights.
Step 2: Equip
Once
you’ve
 identified your unique story, nothingelevates it like a master storyteller. Ensure that you
story’s
 first spokespersons
 — 
most often senior leaders
 — 
are equipped to share the story in a gripping, personalway. Effective preparation:
 Supports leaders in mining their own lives foauthentic stories that help listeners emotionallyconnect with the corporate narrative.
 Provides a rigorous, disciplined approach thatmoves leaders beyond simple, off-the-cuffanecdotes.
 Enhances the effectiveness of existing messageswithout replacing them.
Step 3: Align
It may initially seem counterintuitive, but the best wayto ensure all employees
 — 
across business units,geographies, roles and languages
 — 
are alignedaround a common corporate story may be to firstacknowledge that
we’re
 not all the same. Employeeshave divergent communications preferences andlearning styles. Deliver your story through multipleformats and channels. Think about written scripts, audiofiles, videos, slide presentations, infographics, manager-led discussions, practice sessions for customer-facingemployees, and so forth.
 
 © 2016 Edelman
Step 4: Activate
Storytelling is by nature a communal activity thatreaches the height of its power when it develops alife of its own. Great stories inspire us to re-tell them tostill more people.
That’s
 the magic of the fourth andfinal step: Activate.The best way to guarantee a story will be shared, aka
“goviral,
 is to keep it
“short
 and snack-able.
 In linewith the way we consume media in our personallives, effective employee content today is brief andhighly visual. Bite-sized articles, short videos (90seconds or less), infographics,
“listicles”
 andBuzzfeed-style quizzes generate interest andengagement compared with long-form intranetarticles and dense emails.Yet stories
shouldn’t
 merely be brief
 — 
they need tobe fun. Best-in-class organizations drive engagementwith the corporate story by challenging employeesto take a specific action. This could be as simple asinviting employees to tape themselves answering acentral question or explaining how they support the
company’s
 narrative through their own story. Suchcontent is infinitely shareable, and social networksdistribute storytelling responsibility and amplify
communicators’
 reach.
That’s
 it: Tell a good story well. Make it easy foeveryone to tell it. Keep it going.As long as your organization exists, so should your story.It will evolve and your employee engagement tacticsin support of it will change, but
they’ll
 never cease.One company took the ultimate step, embeddingstorytelling in the way they do business: managersopen every team meeting with a story
 — 
or tap one oftheir reports to do so
 — 
so that everyone has a chanceto tell stories. Now tell us
wouldn’t
 you like to work for that organization?
Think Outside the SlidesT
here’s
 something almost mystical about theprospect of hundreds of thousands of employeessharing one story about a company and itsstrategy. However, when you need to reach alarge and diverse workforce,
it’s
 imperative tothink outside the box slide deck.Edelman supported a global technologyorganization which created a highly visualstorytelling program that transcended language,geography and cultural divides. One of its mosteffective story training tools took the form of anarrated video in which concepts werephysically illustrated in a real-time white boarddrawing. This was accompanied by a step-by-step PDF guide to drawing the
story’s
 centralvisuals. In addition, the story and core supportingmaterials were translated into 18 languages.More than 45,000 employees completed thetraining, and feedback on the program set anew standard for internal education initiatives.
About UsEdelman Employee Engagement helps organizations accelerate business performance, delivered by highlyengaged and trusted employees. For more information, visit us at ee.edelman.com or follow us on Twitter at@EdelmanEE.
 
Show Up in Unexpected Places
Some companies are opting for a non-traditionalapproach, taking what was once a referencetool
 — 
the employee handbook 
 — 
and elevating itto somewhere in the realm of the stone tablet ofcompany lore.Valve Software is one such organization. Itsworkplace experience is so unique
 — 
no bosses,employees choose their own projects, all desksare on wheels
that Valve makes its newemployee handbook  available as a downloadon its jobs site. Coming in at a slim, eminentlyreadable 37 pages,
it’s
 one part guide, one partmanifesto and one part advertisement.
It’s
 alsobeautifully designed to look like a physical book,complete with color illustrations and handwrittennotes in the margins, but lives on the companyintranet where employees can edit it in realtime
 — 
this story is alive.The Valve handbook is a terrific example of whatcan happen when strong communicators movebeyond pulling the company story through inmessage points or even job descriptions(although doing that is advised too).

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