Your workforce defines your organization, from processes to tools to the work culture. If your employees aren’t happy, then you’re likely to face a dip in productivity, which can affect conversions and revenue in the long run.
So, how do you ensure that your employees are engaged and motivated to work? Simple—through internal storytelling!
Internal storytelling entails the narratives that you create and share regarding your organization. This could be the organization’s current goals, long-term vision, and work culture. The idea is to use these narratives to fuel your employees’ motivation and help them connect with your brand.
In simple words, you can call it corporate storytelling.
Let’s know more about how you can implement internal storytelling strategies to bolster your organization’s internal cohesion.
Most companies take employee alignment for granted. After all, you’re paying your employees, so they should be working to benefit the company, right? Wrong!
While salaries are strong motivators, your employees need to feel like they’re creating a positive impact for the organization’s goals. Without understanding how their roles and tasks match with your brand’s vision and goals, they’ll soon feel demotivated and unwilling to work.
With a proper internal storytelling mechanism, you can create a productive work culture that appreciates accountability, transparency, and productivity. This also helps you bridge the gap between upper management and non-management employees, making everyone a part of the bigger picture.
For example, as a leader, you can share stories about the challenges that you’re facing, what you’ve learned as lessons, and how you can incorporate these lessons to your advantage. This humanizes the corporate ladder, and helps you come across as approachable and employee-friendly.
Remember: how you tell your organization’s stories helps you create a brand voice, and this voice can inspire bias towards action.
And we’re not saying this without backing up our claims. Here’s how internal storytelling and effective internal communication can help:
So, the advantages are definitely tangible and trackable, which ensures that you can measure the ROI of your storytelling efforts!
Let’s dig deeper into how internal storytelling creates a positive environment for your workforce:
Better Company Culture: Recognizing and rewarding the wins of your employees helps them connect to the workplace. Your employees feel seen and heard, which leads to better motivation and productivity.
Improved Engagement: A company where employees aren’t engaging with the organization’s initiatives is bound to fall flat sooner rather than later. Your employees are the company’s backbone—keeping them engaged will ensure that they are seen as humans, instead of just cogs in the wheel.
Enhanced Communication: You want your employees to collaborate with each other for shared company wins. Efficient and increased collaboration gets work done faster, without compromising the quality. Use storytelling techniques to encourage communication among teammates and cross-functional teams for the maximum impact.
Superior Leadership: The upper management needs to be considered bona fide leaders who balance business objectives with employee-centric efficiency. This positions the leaders as capable, and employees will WANT to work for leaders like this!
Talent Retention: A company that’s transparent in its approach to management gets the respect of its employees. This ensures that your employees are always willing to go the extra mile, even during challenging periods. The result? Your talent pool remains stable, and attrition rates are lower.
Interactive videos turn your employees from passive observers to active participants in company communications. They’re no longer dealing with one-way communication traffic, and are given the space to voice their concerns, feedback, and ideas.
These videos contain embedded interactive elements that let employees vote on ideas, ask questions, participate in quizzes, and more. Plus, videos like authentic employee stories help inspire confidence in the leadership and management.
Here are a few ways in which you can use interactive videos for internal storytelling:
Measuring the success of your internal storytelling is easy with interactive video platforms like Life Inside. These platforms provide detailed analytics and can be integrated with other analytics tools to understand how your videos are performing.
Here are the metrics you need to monitor for internal storytelling videos:
Life Inside is an interactive video platform that helps you create, collate, and distribute interactive videos. The software is easy to use and integrates seamlessly into your current tech stack. As we mentioned earlier, it also comes with its own set of analytics to track engagement.
If you’ve never used an interactive video platform before, don’t worry—Life Inside has a dedicated in-house content team that can help you get things up and running in a jiffy.
The platform provides you with interactive templates for employee engagement, onboarding, training, and internal storytelling. You can use gamification elements, Live Q&As, “choose your own adventure” video funnels, and a whole lot more to tell your brand’s story and resonate with its employees!
Sign up for Life Inside today, and see how the right tools can help you build a work culture that keeps your employees motivated, engaged, and connected.
When you’re starting interactive video marketing, whether for outbound sales or internal storytelling, don’t overcomplicate the experience. Make the navigation easy, choices streamlined, and the viewer's journey intuitive. Also, the purpose of your videos should be clear immediately to the viewer—don’t beat around the bush!
You’ll have to convince the leadership before starting interactive storytelling initiatives. For this, provide cold, hard data that shows the benefits of internal storytelling. Relate this data to real-life examples and success stories. Lastly, start with a small video to keep the risks low and returns high.