Reflection – Story telling

Challenge

I work in a creative agency, where it is important for individual employees to feel empowered and  inspired. But being a large firm, the organisation’s culture was bureaucratic, process-driven and  hierarchical. This resulted in employees not feeling motivated to take ownership of projects – they  would just follow orders from their superiors. To change this work culture, the organisation set up a  committee that would help identify what changes the organisation needs.

I was part of this committee, and in our research, we realised that there were certain rules and  regulations that made employees feel like the organisation doesn’t empower them. One such rule  was that employees had to swipe their cards before 10 am every morning. If they didn’t, their leaves  or their pay might get cut, unless their immediate superior intervened. This ‘Swipe before 10’ rule  made many employees indignant because they often stayed late into the night working without  compensation. But it was not easy for the top management to change the rule, because they didn’t  see a problem with it. For them, it was a matter of discipline, albeit enforced.

Selection

I employed storytelling as a tool to effectively convince the top management that the rule was  contributing to a bad work culture. Storytelling helps convey a message that has logic, in a way that  helps people have an emotional connection with the subjects of the story. I used this tool because I  didn’t want to give the management a list of things to do that they may not believe in; I wanted to  help them form connections and empathise with employees.

Application

I wanted to communicate that while the rule in itself could be argued to be fair, it is the way it  makes people feel that’s problematic. People needed to be trusted for doing their job – the more  you trust them, the more they will stand up to your trust. And the more calculative you become  about their worth, the more calculative they will become about how much they contribute.

So I told them the story of an HR policy in another organisation. This organisation allowed  employees to take 20 days off in a year. And all employees would make sure that they take 20 days  off, sometimes more in the case of emergencies. But then the organisation changed the rule to say  that every employee can take as many leaves and he/ she sees fit. Surprisingly, this resulted in a  decrease in the average number of leaves employees took in a year. This shows that people  contribute more to an organisation that respects their choices and trusts them to make decisions  good for them and the organisation.

Insight

Hours of reasoning with the top management didn’t help as much as telling them this simple story  did. Storytelling got them to pull back from the task at hand, and look at the issue more objectively  and empathetically by considering other similar situations. I have come to realise that the most  important advantage of design thinking is that it helps people come on the same page faster and  more effectively, so that good decisions get made quicker.

Approach

Instead of storytelling, I could have used data to convince the top management. I could have  conducted a poll to say that x% of people believe that the ‘Swipe before 10’ rule demotivates them.

But this would not have had the same impact. The management would have argued using other data  that showed how people are always on time because of the rule, and how this makes us deliver work  quicker. I could have argued about how employees feel and how that impacts their work using  qualitative data as well, but that would not have cut ice as effectively as storytelling did. Because of  that one conversation, the organisation became more open to knowing about other ideas that we  had as well.

