There are a thousand reasons the pen is mightier than the sword – the power of narrative can create bonds and shape our sense of the world around us. Storytelling can help us understand our purpose and place in the community, the workplace, family, and much more. And the same is true of the power of storytelling in the business world. Statistics, numbers, and graphs are certainly an important part in helping teams understand their organization, but business storytelling plays an equally important role. However, while business storytelling has been growing in both popularity and use, it still remains an underleveraged pillar in many business’s strategies.
Effective storytelling takes time, patience, and practice but when used well, it can add a number of benefits to your business and brand. The benefits of effective business storytelling are so broad that it can be applied across an enterprise, from marketing to recruitment to management, and more. Additionally, the principles and tools of storytelling can be learned by individuals across your organization, from interns to the C suite, which can help build a culture of storytelling – irrevocably changing your business for the better.
Keep reading to learn just a few of the ways in which storytelling can benefit your organization.
Boost productivity and morale
In the last ten years, various studies and polls have demonstrated that workers, ranging in age from mid-20s to 40, deeply value purpose in their work. A culture of storytelling can build a solid foundation where people intuitively and easily understand the mission, goals, and strategies of the organization, and most importantly, how they fit into and contribute to them. By transforming buzzwords and numbers into a narrative of the journey of your business, your employees will feel more connected to the business and their jobs, which can lead to improved motivation, work outputs, and productivity.
Additionally, employees that are engaged and feel they are part of something bigger than them are more likely to be happy at their job, and more happiness at work means better retention, which can save your business a lot of money.
Encourage friendship and connection
While most people work to support themselves and their loved ones, there is still a desire for human connection in the workplace. An Olivet Nazarene University survey revealed that not only do most of us form friendships at work, but employees who are 40+ want to find more friends at work.
Leaders would be well-served to encourage connection and relationship-building among their teams to foster greater collaboration and deeper trust. Just as a culture of storytelling can bring an entire organization together, it can gel individual teams as well. Having a firm understanding of what everyone is working toward can lead to greater productivity, achievement of more ambitious goals, and trust and confidence in each other.
Reduce complexity and confusion
A cohesive storytelling strategy can help everyone in an organization cut down on misinterpretation, confusion, and inaccuracies. Reality can be complex, and this includes the latest sales report. An 80-slide presentation on the report will not be memorable or hold anyone’s attention for very long. Additionally, with that much information, there is room for interpretation which can lead to different conclusions, some of which may be inaccurate. A data story which can be retold will bring the most reliable data to those stakeholders who are using them to make important business decisions.
Conclusion
As the saying goes, teamwork makes the dream work, so teams that truly understand your business can collaborate better to achieve desired goals and improve outcomes. Stories are what resonate with humans – not reams of numbers and data. Even data collection can be delivered in a way that has a captivating beginning, middle, and end to provide a deeper context that can help people make insightful decisions. By leveraging storytelling, your business can see improved productivity, foster friendships in the workplace, and simplify processes.
If your business wants to tell better stories, reach out to Gemini Data today. We help organizations construct a connected view of their business to transform data into stories. While traditional data analytics solutions tend to be static and tabular, failing to capture the evolution of complex data relationships, we help you connect the dots between data from disparate sources to get to insights faster.
