Storytelling for Employee Onboarding
Humanize the process. Transform your culture.
Master the “Make or Break” Moment with Story
Your employee onboarding process can make or break the relationship new hires form with your company. Stories create a warm and engaging welcome into your company’s culture as part of orientation and compliance. It’s the difference between, “Welcome and here is your desk” and “Let me tell you a little bit about why we do what we do, and how you can succeed.”
Why Story? Why Now?
VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE
Stories are tangible, emotional, and easy to recollect and apply.
Humanizing Effect
Stories are about people, what they do, why they do it, and what they’ve learned on the job.
TRUST BUILDER
Stories build trust and ownership and create transparency.
What Our Customers Are Saying
…about integrating storytelling into their onboarding or training program:
Narativ’s Onboarding Program
For more than 20 years, our clients have been creating stronger cultures and supporting initiatives through listening and storytelling. We find the stories that matter most and turn them into fascinating learning content through video production and learning content development.
The end result can be housed in your own LMS or in Narativ’s Story Library which offers a lightweight CMS to categorize, interrelate, and search stories.
Our program is delivered over 6 phases that include:
- Discovery
- Workshops
- Coaching
- Production
- LMS deliverables
- Impact measurement.
Story Enhances Learning Content
When used in onboarding, Narativ’s method:
Brings key ideas to life with memorable moments and relatable experiences
Accelerates understanding, retention, and time to performance
Surfaces new or hidden knowledge from existing employees
Scales mentorship through personal stories of leaders or managers
Creates a repository for organizational memory
Client Profile: Measures for Justice
Our work with Measure for Justice demonstrates how one mentor’s stories were used to train a cohort of new hires.
Learn how to use the power of stories to train new hires.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything we do begins with listening. That is our approach to a Discovery phase, the beginning of our process. Listening is especially important when it comes to storytelling because company narratives come in two flavors: established, “branded” stories; and stories that live within the current moment and reflect change and growth. Those need to be “listened out,” crafted and integrated.
In addition to listening, storytelling coaching is key to our process. We collaborate with you to identify people that will be telling stories for onboarding and coach them in finding, crafting and presenting their stories. Stories from their peers are what make for an entirely more engaging and responsive onboarding experience from the new hire’s perspective. See the entire process in our One Sheet.
We understand employee engagement as essentially a process of assimilating values through storytelling. This is nothing more than harnessing a human being’s innate receptivity to storytelling as a means to imagine and imprint your culture in the hearts and minds of new hires.
When employees live by the values of the organization, they feel a sense of belonging and like their voice matters. By seeing their role through the stories of people who’ve been in their shoes, they remember and integrate key knowledge while being empowered to bring their own life and work experiences to the job. Our onboarding program doesn’t only give tools to be better prepared for one’s new job, it boosts people’s confidence by highlighting the importance of their own story. When we are actively engaged in the crafting of our own story, we are shaping how we want to express ourselves, rather than being spoken for by others. This gives new hires a sense of agency that in turn creates a higher level of engagement.
An example is best. At Measures for Justice, field workers seeking criminal justice data often face challenging interactions with the local police chiefs, attorney generals, or law clerks. There was no way to prepare them for these spontaneous and unpredictable encounters except for shadowing a seasoned employee.
When we collected stories from that employee and new hires listened to those, they had a measurable improvement in their confidence to meet those challenges—before event setting out the door! An additional benefit was training time and expense were greatly reduced with the removal of in-person shadowing (necessitating extensive travel and attendant expenses).
