Leveraging an HR storytelling strategy in your company reinforces legacy mindset or promotes a culture of communication and collaboration. The difference in outcomes reflects whether you, as an HR Professional of Worth, perceive yourself as a compliance regulator or an HR innovator.
Where do you fit into this continuum?
Creating an HR storytelling strategy moves HR professionals – and employees – away from being perceived as order-takers.
Today’s connected software and machine interfaces like to talk with each other and collaborate! Rather seamlessly, in fact. That function and these outcomes are what these interconnected environments are designed to produce, within the Fourth Industrial Revolution Internet of Things ecosystem.
Yet today’s hiring and business models often feel out-of-sync with workplace business and operations models, don’t they? Often, HR professionals, like you, find yourselves hiring one individual to fill one specific job function. End of employee story. Check that box in your HR To-Do list.
If this hiring / business model sounds like an assembly-line, you are correct. That environment is where these models originated, during Third Industrial Revolution: the Age of Mass Production. When products were coming off assembly-lines faster than consumers could purchase them.
As a result, HR professionals focused on “procuring” employees to fulfill specific and singular roles. And making sure that employees remain compliant and focused on “doing their jobs” within the confines of their departments.
The stories from the Age of Mass Production Mindset are quota- and performance-based, where everyone is compliantly doing what they are hired to do. Consequently, these stories reinforce perceived and actual differences in job titles, pay grades, levels of education and generations.
Consider how an HR storytelling strategy engages employees to connect with other employees, across the organization.
- For starters, an HR storytelling strategy is creative, where employees embrace both the risk, as well as the opportunity, of connecting their stories: across job titles, pay grades, levels of education and generations.
- Next, an HR storytelling strategy connects each employee’s “what I do” to what everyone else does, across the organization. Not just within their job function, department or pay grade.
- Then, this strategy facilitates communication across different competencies and levels of education.
- Also, this strategy builds cross-competence and confidence.
- Finally, employees understand that their story encompasses more than quotas and KPIs, as they become more visible, relevant and valuable to clients, and impact customer experience, success and retention.
Consider how creating a workforce co-invested in the human capital value of an HR storytelling strategy positively impacts employee experience and retention rates. Food for thought this week.
Take the next steps in creating a compelling HR storytelling strategy.
- Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Engage me to present one of my Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs, workshops or moderated facilitation services. Contact me here.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling Speaking Programs leverage purpose-driven storytelling for STEM professionals and left brain thinkers to catalyze employee and customer success and retention. Babette motivates individuals and teams to combine courage, curiosity and critical thinking skills to co-create compelling stories which inspire trust in one another. Especially in digitally transforming industries with STEM and left-brain stakeholders.
Find out more about Babette’s professional story here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication tools and methods, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here.
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