5 Keys to Employee Story Success 👈
We created this guide to help you increase support, sustainability, and ROI of your employee story program. ✅
1. Make sure the timing is right.
Ideally, answer yes to all of these questions.
- Leadership has set a tone where the voice of employees matters.
- Leadership has committed to do more to enhance the employee experience.
- Our employer brand and reputation is a priority this year.
- We have clear values and want to do more to reinforce them.
2. Clarify key roles and work as a team.
We highlight 5 main objectives for your program. Just make sure you have someone thinking about it.
- Planning - prioritizing content needs and timing for campaigns.
- Collection - responsible for engaging and coaching employees as storytellers.
- Internal Sharing - ensures stories are leveraged across departments.
- External Sharing - ensures approved stories are promoted for recruiting, sales, etc.
- Leadership Support - ensures that leaders encourage involvement from employees.
3. Create internal champions by linking to goals.
Review plans, documents, and resources to find clear links where employee stories can help other departments and teams. This can boost internal support for your program. Below is a list of some of the most likely company documents that will give you clues. Find opportunities to align employee generated stories with company priorities found in:
- Employee Surveys
- Strategic Plans
- KPIs and OKRs
- Management Scorecards
- Budget priorities
- Hiring Plans
4. Create a calendar for key campaigns.
Build out your calendar and share it with key stakeholders who will benefit most. When ready, consider publicizing your calendar for employees to see.
12 Awesome Recurring Campaign Ideas
- Celebrate Success - monthly campaign to collect stories aligned to values.
- New Hire Heroes - campaign to collect stories about new hires and their impact.
- Day in the Life - campaign highlighting an employees' day (by staff level).
- First Month Wrap - Invite new hires to share highlights from their 1st week or month.
- Anniversaries - campaign to collect employees' proudest moment for every year.
- Intern Impact - seasonal campaign to capture stories about intern work experiences.
- Campus Recruiting - capture stories alumni who attended schools you recruit from.
- Career Transition - collect stories to spotlight successful transitions from another industry.
- Candidate Journey - campaign to capture stories about the candidate journey.
- Mentor Moments - campaign to spotlight mentor and mentee relationships.
- Corporate History - invite long-timers to recall pivotal moments and why they matter.
- Training Time - invite employees to share a success related to prior technical training.
- Day, Week, Month Celebrations - Administrative Professionals Month, etc.
5. Other critical success factors
Below are some other tips to ensure success and value from your efforts. Another outstanding resource to aid your planning is shared by Rally Recruitment Marketing HERE.
- Have a centralized way to collect and leverage stories so they are easily accessible.
- Ask leaders set the tone and have a plan to get stories from key leaders.
- Document metrics we want to achieve and how we will measure determine success.
- Identify channels to send consistent reminders, i.e. email, text, newsletters.
- Recruit a small group of ambassadors who will publish first stories and encourage others.
🎥 BONUS WEBINAR: Engaging Reluctant Employee Storytellers for Recruitment Marketing.