Two employees greet each other as they walk from the parking lot to their office:
"Did you see the CEO interview yesterday? …It was strange seeing him in a bike helmet."
"Yeah. I didn't know he normally rides his bike to work. Someone told me he even bikes in the rain."
The most common approach is to capture sustainability stories - perhaps about something an employee, senior leader, or other stakeholder has done - and share these more broadly throughout the organization. A second approach is to integrate stories and storytelling into new employee onboarding. We have also seen some organization invest in storytelling training, and include storytelling as a part of training exercises so that employees can begin to integrate sustainability stories into their everyday interactions out in the operations.
A practitioner at an electronics manufacturing company recounts his experience with a sustainability story:
"I heard about this great innovation in one of our plants that saved a bunch of energy and saved a lot of money. I decided to capture that story and put it in our weekly newsblast. Before I knew it we had five other people coming forward with ideas."
Practitioners often start with this approach when they are thinking about how they can use stories to embed sustainability. Often times they will share these stories in an email blast, or post them on a company intranet or internal social network. Sometimes these stories are written up. Other times practitioners will partner with communications professionals and develop the stories into videos or short films.
If these stories are told in a way that others in your organization can relate to, they have the potential to inspire people to reflect on their own experiences as they talk about these stories with others in their organization. However, we've seen that this approach alone is unlikely to forge a sustainability narrative. It needs to be combined with other approaches where people in your organization are engaged more directly to be the storytellers.
A manager recalls his first week on the job while having coffee with a new employee:
"Thinking back, what I most remember is that our VP turned up at the start of our onboarding session…and then he told us about a time early in his career when he worked in another company and felt a lot of pressure to push the limits on safety to meet the production numbers. They ended up having a bad accident and one of his direct reports was injured. What stays with me is that he said we should never feel like we face that choice here."
Engaging senior leaders, or respected managers, to share personal stories can be a powerful way to socialize new hires, and give them something to draw on when making their own choices.
Increasingly, we are starting to see organizations send both senior and emerging leaders for training to become better storytellers, and also incorporate stories into regular employee training.
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One innovative example comes from an organization that made storytelling a core part of trying to shift its narrative around safety. In developing a new mandatory day-long training session on safety, they elected to have employees lead the sessions and invested in training these employees in storytelling. These employees then guide a group of fellow employees through crafting a fictional story about a personal safety incident.
The facilitator asks each employee to think of an at-risk behaviour they engage in regularly (such as talking on a cell phone while driving), and then to imagine that they have an accident in which they get hurt. The employees need to describe who would find them first.
Then, they are asked to think through the friends, family, and co-workers who would need to be contacted, and how each of these people would be affected by their injury (for example, maybe they miss an important trip they planned with their daughter, or maybe their partner is unable to work for an extended period of time because they need to act as a caregiver).
As they discuss each of these accidents, they get practice experiencing what it is like to share stories about safety. In the process, they discover the moral that, "safety is not just about me. It's about all of the other people in my life who would be affected if I got hurt."
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Practitioners are also beginning to consider how they can integrate sustainability stories into daily activities in their companies. This is an increasingly common approach in high-risk industries in an effort to cultivate new narratives around safety.
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A safety moment is a quick tip or anecdote about a time when you put yourself or another person in a situation that was unsafe. In some organizations, safety moments have become mandatory; all meetings, whether at the corporate office or out in the field, start with a safety moment.
In an analogy to safety moments, some practitioners have experimented with "sustainability moments". However, like safety moments, it takes time for employees to feel comfortable sharing sustainability stories. It can be particularly challenging because they may not have a clear understanding of what sustainability means for the company and what it means in their own life. At the beginning, employees may not be able to identify sustainability stories. They may need to hear other people's stories first before they can start to reflect on their own experiences.
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b This is a fictional interaction developed for the purposes of this guidebook.
c This is a true story from a global electronics manufacturing firm.