Good onboarding is becoming increasingly important for you and your future employees. But how can this onboarding period be made even more successful? We show you how to enhance the onboarding process with the storytelling method and integrate new employees into your company even faster!
Tell Stories!
That very well describes the core of storytelling: It’s about how you can use emotions to convey information even better. Even dry numbers and facts become a lively and captivating topic for your counterpart through a good story. This convinces you faster, because good stories are simply easier to sell!
You can apply the method in any life situation where you want to convey information in a relaxed and fun manner. That’s why it is particularly well-suited for the onboarding phase of new employees. But how does storytelling actually work?
Good Stories Are the Foundation for Storytelling
The storyteller Thomas Pyczak has derived a short formula for good stories from this. It goes as follows:
Story = Character + Dilemma + Desired Resolution
Now All That’s Left Are the Ingredients of a Good Story:
Your Mission: What goal are you pursuing with this story? What do you want to convey to your employee?
Your Agent: Every story needs a hero that your employee can identify with – a person with a name and recognition value.
Your Problem: Your hero encounters a conflict that prevents him/her from achieving the set goal.
Your Solution: At the end of every story, there is a resolution about how your hero overcame the conflict.
This results in a rough structure of every good story that you can also use for the onboarding of your employees.
Tip: The most important factor for convincing storytelling is authenticity – your stories must be genuine. Only then can you convey emotions and truly captivate your counterpart!
The Concept: A good story for your onboarding consists of idea, relevance, and emotions.
And how can storytelling be implemented in onboarding?
In principle, onboarding ensures that your new employees gradually adapt to the processes of your company and get to know the other employees. Some storytelling formats are particularly well-suited for this process – we have three ideas for you that we have already tested at blink.it in our onboarding:
1. Have your employees create welcome videos.
Especially personal greetings from future colleagues are very motivating at the beginning. As a short video, they ease the entry into the new work environment. They also give new employees the opportunity to get to know the entire team more quickly.
According to the storytelling rule, a colleague can also share challenges from their own early days. This relieves new employees from the pressure of having to be “perfect” during the onboarding period.
2. Present the company’s history.
Background knowledge about the company’s founding and development helps new employees to better understand and internalize processes and rules within the company. Those who know the story understand the dynamics of your company – this knowledge should not be withheld from new employees!
For good storytelling, this company history can be told directly from the perspective of a leader or even directly by one of the founders. Challenges or small setbacks can also create an exciting story for new employees.
3. Showcase past success stories.
Achievements already made motivate new employees to orient themselves towards these and make progress themselves. These stories also show what opportunities exist in your company and encourage peak performance!
Here too, in the sense of the storytelling formula, you can use a hero and obstacles: What was the goal? What did “the hero” do to achieve it? What problems did the hero have, and how did he/she solve them?
Onboarding with Stories – A Testimonial:
Finally, in the spirit of storytelling, a personal story: At blink.it, storytelling is an integral part of onboarding. During my onboarding phase, I continuously received personal video messages from my colleagues, which helped me settle into the team very quickly. The company history was also shared with me in a small group. Through small anecdotes, it became particularly exciting!
In the first weeks, I also kept a video diary, which my colleagues could watch to get to know me better – with all the successes and little problems of my early days. Thus, I also became the hero in a story.
In my view, storytelling is a wonderful method to welcome new employees to the team. It also makes it easier for new employees to discover their own place in the company – and the little personal stories are also fun! 🙂
Onboarding with storytelling in an online course, sessions with the new colleagues, and a video diary: all these are possible aspects for your "blended onboarding" concept. How exactly it works, you can learn from the free guide.
