Storytelling Tool

Challenge

For three years now I have been part of the customer service sector of a company that  provides cable and internet service, in which I have slowly been acquiring more  supervisory responsibilities. Due to the pandemic, we have seen the need to have more  employees. However, due to the large numbers of attention and the dislike of customers  for the current circumstances, these new employees have been demotivated with their  performance. They do not believe we are meeting the expectations that our bosses  believe we should meet. That is why we, as supervisors, have made the decision to try to  improve the motivation of these new colleagues, which we hope will later impact their  work behavior.

Selection

As a team, it is the ﬁrst time that we apply Design Thinking in problem solving, we have  decided to use Storytelling as a tool in this oportunity and the selection is not arbitrary.  This type of approach is the most important to focus on the human factor of our new  employees.

Application

The idea is to ﬁnd the common ground between their current concerns and those that we  had at the beginning of our work journey. We realized that our bosses were losing sight of  the need to think of our colleagues not only as factors within a production chain, but also  that it was essential to foster a two-way relationship where something could be learned  from both sides.

These new employees need to know that there is someone who cares not only about the  performance of their work, but that there is someone who cares about how they feel  about the Way they are performing this task. In discussing the conditions in which this  tool was to be carried out, we decided to focus on putting those we were going to talk to  comfortable, creating a friendly and calm environment. They ended up setting up small  breakfast meetings, in which I and one of my colleagues who shared almost the same  trajectory would sit down with one or two of these new colleagues.

Once this space was set up, we called in groups of two colleagues to come and sit with  us and tell us their concerns, while we shared a coﬀee and a small sandwich. We let them  talk without interrumpting them at any moment.

Insight & Approach

It was a revelation to ﬁnd that these new employees were not dissatisﬁed with their performance  but fearful of the mistakes they might make. They did not want to go through the situation of  being called for attention. It was clear that the way we and our bosses were training or explaining  our way of working was not beneﬁting them.

Once they ﬁnished talking, we shared our own experiences starting with what were once new  activities and in an unfamiliar environment. This seemed to calm us remarkably, the storytelling  served to ﬁnd this common territory and expose that where they are today we were before.

It was obvious by the end of these meetings that we had to reread the way we were approaching  these new employees. There had to be a change in the relationship and arrive in a more humane  way to be able to change and improve our work and theirs.

Our team saw the beneﬁt of these more casual encounters with our employees and the beneﬁts  that were provided when improving our workﬂow to be able to ﬁnd stories that would allow us to  ﬁnd a common space among all. At the same time, we think that perhaps a little more  understanding is lacking in seeing how to help our employees themselves ﬁnd a way to improve in  their task. So now we are planning how to implement the Visualization Tool to see how they see  themselves now and in the future in this job.

