Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

I work in a People Analytics team of a technology company. People Analytics is the

collection and use of data in order to improve employee experience. Overall, our

mission is related to increasing engagement and performance, and decreasing

turnover. For many leaders, People Analytics is considered a new trend, since Human

Resources departments used to guide their decisions by their personal opinions, and

not by the use of data. Because of this, we are used to finding resistance when we

present our analysis and insights with leaders that aren’t used to this approach to

people management.

This week, I had the opportunity to share an analysis that our team did on the

relationship between development employee engagement, performance and turnover.

This presentation would be especially challenging, since I would present it directly to the

managers of an area with a high employee turnover, which is a sensitive point.

Selection

I selected the storytelling tool because People Analytics is not just about analyzing data,

it’s about telling a compelling story that will connect with the audience. We can have

data of the highest quality and use the best analytics tools, but we won’t be able to

engage the audience and effectively implement changes in the organization without

compelling storytelling.

Application

In the Storytelling video, Francisco Patel said that “Storytelling puts the human beings and

their experience front and center”. The first step for that is to understand our audience.

In order to do that, I analysed my audience using these questions: Who will be watching

my presentation? What is their level of knowledge about the employee engagement,

performance and turnover? What are their pain areas regarding these subjects? How

can my presentation help them to succeed as leaders?

After deepening my understanding about the audience, I didn’t go straight to

PowerPoint to start constructing my slides. Instead, I opened a document and wrote

what would be the story that I was going to tell them, what questions I would like to

answer and what feelings I would like to transmit. This way, I had clear goals for the

impact of my presentation on the audience - I wasn’t putting myself and what I thought

that was important in the first place, the leaders’ needs were the most important thing.

When I finally began to work on my presentation, I was able to curate the data and

analysis that I had to understand which pieces of information would contribute to my

storytelling, instead of starting with data and looking at the story as secondary. It

allowed me to have less data and graphics, but better ones. I also had moments of

reflection between me and the audience, in order to build suspense as by Andre

Martin’s suggestions. To deeply connect with the audience, I also brought anonymous

employees commentaries regarding what engaged or disengaged them, hoping to

connect with their emotional side and to increase their empathy with the subject.

Insight

Focusing on the story rather on the data allowed me to connect more with the leaders

to whom I was presenting our analysis. The use of employees’ commentaries was a

success, since the leaders were able to see beyond the demographic and they could

really empathize with the people behind the commentaries. The presentation flowed

effortlessly, since I was focused on the narrative behind the slides and not on the slides

themselves.

In the beginning, I believed that focusing on storytelling would make me take longer to

work on a presentation, but it wasn’t true. Even though I had to take a different

approach than what I was used to, beginning with the story felt more natural and less

forced.

Approach

For my next presentations, I will definitely keep using storytelling tools. I look forward to

studying more about Storytelling with Data, since it can be specially tricky, but using the

tips provided in this course have already helped me improve my presentation skills.

I believe that storytelling is also useful in routine interactions (such as meetings and

informal conversations), not only in presentations, and I’ll focus on improving how I tell

the story in these situations as well.

