Reflection – Storytelling Tool

Challenge

A common challenge that I have experienced throughout the general manufacturing industry, is hiring,  retention, and development of direct labor employees.  Often, direct labor employees come and go  frequently, staying for short terms, leaving the existing front-line supervisors and company management  feeling jaded, frustrated, and impatient.  This results in non-existent or unstructured development and  team engagement strategies, as the leadership team assumes, they will be of no use, as each new  employee is just temporarily passing through, until they have proven otherwise by staying after ‘x’  months or years.  The issue with this, is the cause and effect perhaps should be flipped.  We stand a  higher chance of the employee staying if we strategize and execute development activities frequently,  rather than make those activities dependent on whether the employee shows interest and achieves a  long enough tenure.  I am sure this is not a novel idea, as I have read and discussed this on numerous  occasions with many industry professionals, and quite frankly this is a best practice instilled by many  companies globally.  However, the execution of this is still a challenge in many companies and  leadership teams.  And although there are plenty of options around what those strategies and  approaches look like to engage direct labor employees, I would like to focus more on how this challenge  extends to the stakeholders in the previous step, which are the frontline leaders, and how their buy-in is  just as important.  Initial feedback from the frontline leaders was that pay wage was the biggest driving  factor in this challenge.  However, interviews with the direct labor employees painted a different  picture.  Not only did I interview current long-standing employees, but also newer employees, including  those exiting our team upon resignation.  The most common theme around this group’s feedback was  the communication, mannerism, and treatment from their frontline leaders was one of the most  significant factors in their job enjoyment and reasons for resignations.

Selection

This is where the Storytelling tool comes in to play.  The most important element of the Storytelling  approach is how it connects to the audience’s emotions.  In this challenge, I was faced with a group of  frontline supervisors who did not believe in strategic team building and employee engagement  activities.  After speaking with them one-on-one, it was clear that the emotions around their challenge  of seemingly having no control over high direct labor turn-over had taken over their perspectives.  The  feeling of frustration and hopelessness overpowered any verbal directions to simply “engage your  employees” or “conduct performance reviews”.  Thus, in this situation, I felt that storytelling would be  the best way to “reset” their perspective, connecting to their emotions through my own stories, and  subsequently being able to provide a clear path and potential alternative “endings” to the stories that  they could relate back to and utilize.

Application

After the initial journey exploration of both the direct labor employees and the frontline leaders, I set up  one-on-one touchpoints with the frontline leaders.  The Storytelling began first with me recounting  some of my own stories involving my past experiences in other job roles, several of those roles also  being prior frontline leader roles, similar to the ones they held.  Based on the challenges they were  facing, which I also observed, I used my own stories to gain some mutual respect and trust, which  allowed them to understand that I had experienced similar journeys.  More importantly, I focused in

equal detail on the parts within my stories that resulted in employees changing their behavior and  perspective.  Through the story, I was careful to explain to them how giving everyone a chance to say  their part and simply listen and take the time to reflect, was sometimes enough to come up with  appropriate responses which encouraged development, motivation, and generation of new ideas.   Again, all of this illustrated through the story with real cases.  I was careful to carry the reflection portion  through to the actual one-on-one session.  As this course explained, the reflection at certain points upon  hearing the story is important. I paused throughout my storytelling to prompt them with questions, both  regarding my own story and directing questions relating to their own challenges they were facing.  There  was a second and third part to this storytelling application.  Through my own storytelling, which resulted  in great open discussion, the frontline leaders were able to begin telling their own stories back to me,  which in turn helped me to understand their challenges even more.  The third part was that I  encouraged them to use the same story telling techniques with their own direct labor employees as a  way to draw them in closer into the team, especially the new employees, touching on more positive  emotion and sense of front-line leader support.  Most often, I heard them tell stories of their own  development through the business, which gave the new employees a better sense of similar  development opportunities in front of them.

Insight

One insight that I had during this storytelling strategy was that the story had to be planned.  Plenty of  times, I witnessed past leaders tell their stories very naturally, as if they were able to grab a certain story  out naturally without effort that applied to a particular challenge, that helped the team to work through  it.  I have since realized that this is not without effort.  In fact, this comes with great practice, and there  can be a method behind that practice.  The tips in this course, such as know your audience to connect  with their perspectives and emotions, is key.  I took a couple days of reflecting on my own collection of  experiences, converting them to “stories”, and mentally organized them into stories that were  applicable to different groups of employees, and different situations.  I found this similar to preparing  for a job interview.

Approach

I found that the storytelling approach worked very well in tackling this challenge.  Our company  experienced more positive survey feedback from both employees and agencies working with our  recruitment efforts.  We also saw lower turnover and new employees staying for longer periods.  We  even heard from long tenured employees who reported positive changes they saw in their front-line  leaders.  Given the great results, I would use a similar approach towards similar challenges in the future,  using the same techniques and insights learned through this storytelling experience.  I think there is  always opportunity though to continue to tweak one’s stories and focuses, depending on the situation.

