Business storytelling: tips, ideas, and examples

In this fast-paced, competitive world of business, the ability to effectively communicate and engage with your employees, customers and other stakeholders is critical. It fosters understanding, builds trust and ultimately drives success. And one powerful way to make sure your communications tactics are hitting the mark is through business storytelling.

Business storytelling is the art of using narratives to convey messages, ideas and values in a compelling manner. It goes beyond knowledge transfer or entertainment. Corporate storytelling aims to connect with the audience by appealing to their emotions, experiences, and aspirations. Real business stories engage on an emotional level AND drive specific organisational goals.

In this blog, we explore the significance of business storytelling and how organisations can use it to solve different challenges. You’ll get ideas from the essential tips and real world examples to help you kick start your business storytelling journey.

Why is business storytelling important now, more than ever?

Whether it’s conveying insights to stakeholders or an informal chat over the watercooler, stories have always played a central role in how we connect, learn and thrive at work.

Yet in today’s digital age, business storytelling has struggled to gain traction. While billions of messages are shared daily across countless channels, it can be hard to find the stories you need in the sea of endless content. But, it’s precisely those organisations that have managed to digitally unlock real work experiences who have the competitive edge.

In business, storytelling serves as a bridge between information, understanding and action. Rather than simply presenting facts and figures, stories create a connection with the audience by bringing to life real, lived experiences.

This is particularly true of employee storytelling. Hearing from leaders and coworkers first hand is one of the most powerful forms of corporate storytelling. Not only does it amplify employee voice, it’s also relatability, authentic and instils trust in the stories shared.

It’s this connection which leads to better business outcomes like increased employee engagement, better knowledge retention, improved learning outcomes, higher productivity or stronger brand loyalty. Stories are more memorable than other, often dryer, formats and as such they help achieve organisational goals more effectively.

The need for storytelling has also never been greater for the hybrid workforce. With dispersed employees, different time zones and flexible work being the norm, digital channels are not only channels of communication, they’re often a lifeline for workers. It’s how people now learn and connect because those water cooler moments aren’t happening.

The benefits of business storytelling show how vital it is:

• • • Storytelling engages and inspires. A captivating story moves people to action. It’s this strong engagement and trigger that helps achieve your business goals. Whether you are battling upskilling and reskilling or trying to increase employee retention, engagement is your road to success.
    • A good story builds trust. Trust is perceived as a rare commodity for businesses these days. And, with CEOs being among the least trusted on Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2022, it’s something businesses need to work on. Authentic stories are a great way to do this.
    • Business storytelling simplifies complex topics. So many concepts and ideas get buried because people don’t engage with them. A story can bring these to life in a way that’s relatable.
    • Storytelling levels up communication. Having open communication channels is not enough. It needs to be effective. Using structured storytelling facilitates impactful communication across departments and throughout every level of an organisation.
    • Business stories build connection. Culture matters more than ever. Employees who feel a sense of belonging are more likely to stay and work hard towards a common goal.

The benefits are clear. In a time when budgets are tightening and teams are expected to do more with less, organisations need tactics that deliver real business value. Smart businesses understand the power of a great story and are using them to amplify employee voice, drive learning, increase performance and motivate change.

How to use storytelling in business

Storytelling can be used across organisations and how you use storytelling in business will depend on your goals. For example, if you are struggling with recruitment, you might want to use stories to stand out from the crowd and attract the best talent.

Here are some ideas where business storytelling is already making the most impact:

Onboarding

Onboarding comes with a clear set of goals: time-to-competence, new starter connectivity and retention. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Particularly when a hybrid working environment makes it hard to create a sense of connection and belonging.

This is where storytelling makes a real difference. A great story helps new starters feel connected to people, purpose and their future careers even before Day 1. Showing company culture through stories means people get a sense of how things are done ‘around here’ and paves the way for that all important trust, retention and productivity.

Find out more about the impact onboarding video stories can have in your organisation.

Talent Mobility

The employment market is constantly changing and implementing an internal mobility strategy can be one of the best tools HR and Talent teams can leverage to stay competitive. When employees look for new opportunities within the company, storytelling can highlight career paths, success stories and the development support available. This encourages people to consider moving internally instead of looking elsewhere. 

Learning and Training

There is no shortage of learning content out there. In fact, L&D teams are faced with an ever growing mountain of demand for training and development. Unfortunately, just because content has been created doesn’t mean it has the desired impact. Incorporating storytelling into learning, and particularly stories in the form of user-generated content, hits the most important elements for meeting learning outcomes: engagement, scale, skills and quality.  

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I)

Many organisations struggle to achieve real outcomes in DE&I. Numbers alone don’t inspire us to change behaviour. People and stories do. After all, hearing stories allow us to take a different perspective and stand in someone else’s shoes which opens the door to more nuanced conversations. Storytelling is a universal human experience and helps us look through a new lens. Sharing employee experience and challenges to foster effective DE&I has the power for real change. 

Early Careers

Anyone working in HR and Talent Management will tell you recruitment is a tough job, even more so when dealing with early careers. While recent figures show a moderate 3% decrease in overall graduate applications, numbers of those applying for apprenticeships have seen an increase of 17%. Yet companies are struggling with attracting and retaining candidates, as well as keeping them engaged. Business storytelling will help differentiate your early careers programmes, from recruitment through to follow on roles in the business.

Find out more about the impact early careers stories can have in your organisation.

Tips for Business Storytelling

Storytelling at work isn’t alway easy. But, following a few storytelling tips for business will set you on the right path:

Have a clear goal

Your storytelling campaign needs a clear, specific objective and should align closely with the business goal you’re aiming to meet. This keeps you on track to sharing the best stories. Whether it’s learning, performance or something else, success will depend on making your stories authentic, relatable and engaging. Supporting your goal with real work experiences from employees and leaders is an impactful form of storytelling for business.

Keep it engaging

How will you keep your audience engaged? Think about the best medium for your stories and your audience, whether it’s through articles, videos or presentations. Video stories, more than any other medium, will likely have the biggest impact because it’s easier to invoke an emotional connection and our brains process visual content faster.

Keep it relevant and concise

One common mistake is going into too much detail. It’s understandable as so many business topics are complex. But with 82% people struggling to codify complex experiences by themselves (according to Havard research), it’s important to keep your storytellers on track with a brief. If you’re sharing stories on video, using tools like StoryTagger help provide in-built frameworks and prompts so your storytellers stay on-point. With more complex topics, consider breaking down points into a series.

Provide context

If you’re asking people to share stories they need to know why. Being clear on why something matters increases engagement and impact. It helps storytellers understand the reason for doing something and the benefits in the context of their organisation and role. It’s important to answer the all-important ‘What’s In It For Me?’ question.

Narrative story arc

Having a clear structure with a beginning, middle, and end to your story will help maintain a logical flow so your audience can follow the narrative. People aren’t natural storytellers so having tools and technology in place for this is a must. With StoryTagger, you can curate your campaigns around a structure and key talking points. This way, storytellers can follow guidance you’ve set and the resulting stories will provide consistent value.

Build in authenticity and trust

Your stories need to be authentic and relatable to build trust. As we’ve already noted, Edelman research shows CEO’s aren’t the most trusted of voices so think about inviting people at different levels of your business to be advocates and storytellers. User-generated stories from employees build credibility with co-workers on important topics.

Don’t ignore scalability

Stories don’t have to be from one senior leader, they should be captured from across your organisation. And this can be done with the right tools. Before you start your storytelling journey, ask yourself:

• • • How will you share your stories? Can you scale them easily? If you’re looking at storytelling videos, traditional corporate video often makes it hard to reach everyone and can have a high price tag. But user-generated content (UGC) will make a huge difference here. UGC, and particularly user-generated video (UGV) is a powerful form of storytelling and a cost-effective way to capture the stories you need.
    • Will scaling compromise on the quality and consistency of your stories? Telling a compelling, purposeful business story is more complex than creating a one off TikTok reel. Use technology and best practice to maintain quality and consistency at scale.
    • Can you use storytelling to upskill your workforce at the same time? When used effectively, business storytelling has the power to help employees develop future skills like communication, critical thinking and emotional intelligence.

Empowering your employees to be co-creators of the stories you need to share has many benefits. Find out how guided UGC video can transform your experts into inspiring content creators so you can democratise storytelling. You’ll also find more storytelling tips for business in our Storytelling At Work guide.