Reflection – Story Telling

Challenge and Selection

I work for a company called apple in India.  Till about 2 years ago; the organization was  primarily India centric and concentrated around pharmaceuticals and manufacturing business.

Recently, the organization went through a massive expansion oversees in countries like the USA; UK,  Europe and South East Asia.  From two businesses, it ventured into newer businesses like Financial  Services, Real Estate and Information Management Services.  The number of employees also increased  from 4000 in India to 10,000 globally across continents.  One of the fundamental beliefs the organization  had since its inception in 1982 was on its core Values of Knowledge, Action and Care.  They have got  deeply ingrained in the DNA of the organization and every decision was being taken in the light of values  that the organization believed in.  With all the expansion happening; it was imperative for me, being the  Cultural and Change expert, to communicate these values to our new employees and have them become  a part of all the new businesses and their culture.  We wanted to take the values beyond writings on the  wall and have them be a compass for the way decisions are being made across in our businesses.  We  wanted Values to be our ‘go to guides’ during ethical dilemmas and crucial decision making processes  within these businesses.  This had to be done not just for the newer businesses but also for the old ones  since our landscape was vastly changing.

I chose storytelling as a tool to drive this effort since the power of storytelling is universal across cultures;  disciplines and over time.  It is also a tool that motivates and engages employees and creates a pull  strategy with people to have them buy into the values of the company.  So I visualized an intervention  that will allow people to tell their values stories, how have they seen Knowledge, Action and Care  manifesting in their personal lives and thus improve retention of these values in their minds.  Once the  retention is established and personal relevance is observed, for the phase 2; I visualized them creating  stories or scenarios where the values based approach can be implemented in the work lives.

Application

As part of phase 1; I designed a book of stories that had stories from ancient Indian mythology and popular  story texts from books like Jataka Tales, Aesop’s Fables; Bible Stories; Ramayana, Panchatantra etc.  The  book had visuals and graphics to explain these tales and each of the stories linked back to Knowledge,  Action and Care.  For E.g. the thirsty crow and how it pulled water out of the pitcher using pebbles was  linked to Innovation which was one of the behaviors within Knowledge. The physical copies of book were  shared with employees across the globe and they were encouraged to share stories with their families  and friends and share similar stories from their cultures that linked to these values.  In a span of about 4  weeks; we received as many as 7500 stories from our employees across the globe.  The testimonies kept  pouring, re-emphasizing to employees that their personal values and the organization’s values are not  different and that they are largely aligned in terms of how we believe and act in accordance to those  guidelines.

Once this meaning and linkage was established, we ran a second intervention wherein we got employees  to think about instances where they have used our values to decide or incorporate new team behaviors  in their functions and departments.  Employees across the globe again came back with stories of how

using value based decisions they could improve relationships with customers; showed care towards a  grieving or a sick co-worker; improved work situations; took additional care for environment;  implemented new work processes etc. We then published these stories for the entire organization with a  message that every small decision or an action we take has a potential to be looked at from the lens of  our values and therefore creating higher business or personal value for the organization or for an  individual.

Insight and Approach

The entire change process could have been quite demanding on our organization.  The biggest insight for  me was people change when they believe in the change process themselves and could relate to the values  instead of being told to do so.  People love when the experience is personalized for them and through the  method of storytelling we could inspire employees to change, to share values, and to transfer not just  knowledge, but experience and wisdom as well.  Also; if we wanted them to live the values and not just  speak; I realized that actions and involvement will speak louder than mere words and therefore that  insight helped us involve employees in co-creating a shared meaning of values across the organization.   When we ran our employee engagement survey with about 9000 employees few months ago; almost 90%  of people said that they understand and believe in the organizational values and that they see their leaders  and co-workers practicing and living by those values too.

As a result of this course; I have learnt that when such a large scale change process needs to be initiated  I could probably also use Learning Launch Tool to experiment the idea in a few businesses before taking  it to all the businesses.  Since we are growing from 10,000 to 15,000 employees this year; the learning  launch tool can help me test out hypothesis in one or two complex businesses and then basis those  learnings, run the change process across other businesses and geographies.

