Storylistening in Companies: Why you should urgently Listen to your Colleagues

People love stories. Always have been. They used to scribble their adventures on rock faces or tell them to each other around the campfire. Book, podcast, virtual reality, film – today we pour our stories into a wide variety of formats. At Mashup Communications, we firmly believe that every person is full of stories and so is every company. Storylistening is an excellent method for bringing these anecdotes and adventures of employees to light. Shared, authentic narratives go hand in hand with the sister discipline of storytelling to help strengthen cohesion within a company, communicate (new) values or support change management, for example.

The Young Script: How to Storylistening

Storylistening is an excellent method for teasing out the stories that lie dormant in your colleagues. Our weapon of choice: a whole bunch of questions. The motto of the hour: the courage to leave gaps. The method really puts the interviewers responsible to the test. They know in advance exactly 0.0 percent of what their colleagues are about to tell them, so they have to respond spontaneously to their counterparts. However, it’s worth taking the plunge into the deep end, because the most exciting stories reliably make their way through.

Your values play a very important role in the search for stories in your company. They are the starting point of every storylistening session and get the narrative ball rolling. Let’s take ourselves at Mashup and our value of flexibility as an example. We lay the foundation with the question “What specific moment can you think of when flexibility really came into its own for you personally?” The answer just shoots out of some of them. Others may think for a moment. But pretty much everyone at our agency can think of an example.

Unfortunately, this is where the storylistening script ends and the freestyle part begins. Defining a fixed catalog of further questions is of relatively little use, because you can’t possibly foresee what the answer will be. Your goal should be to learn as much as possible about the event itself, the feelings of your colleagues and the people involved in the story. Like a gold digger, you unearth the glittering details of the story by digging deeper in the right places. However, you will have to decide for yourself during the interview which ones are the right ones.

Wonder Weapon Storylistening: 3 Important Functions of Story Collecting

1. Strengthen cohesion

A storylistening session rarely comes alone, because after all, the aim of the method is to bring a company closer together. A corporate campfire is a particularly nice conclusion to the individual interviews: regardless of whether they were interviewed or not – all colleagues are currently gathering digitally around a virtual one for storytelling. Experience has shown that this happens with lots of laughter, questions and mutual support. Afterwards, the employees go their separate ways with a strengthened team spirit.

2. Communicating values

The core of every company – and ideally of all employees – are the values it represents internally and externally. You use storylistening to make these abstract concepts tangible: You give the values the faces of your colleagues, who bring them to life with their personal experiences. Within the company, you can immortalize the stories in the form of a podcast or small eBook, for example. Outwardly, a newsletter or a landing page on your website, for example, are suitable. In this way, customers and interested parties can also immerse themselves in your world.

3. Accompany change management

Many people are afraid of change. Of course, it is impossible to predict whether things will change for the better or worse. Nevertheless, companies must move with the times and constantly put their convictions to the test. Change is particularly drastic when it affects values – the glue that binds all employees together. With storylistening, you take the threat out of this change process and give it a positive connotation instead. It is very likely that all of your colleagues have had to go through major changes in the course of their lives. True to the motto “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, they have grown through many of these challenges. You can anchor this positive interpretation of change in your company with storylistening (and storytelling based on it).

3 Reasons Why every Team should Try Storylistening

1. The employees feel heard

Whether you’ve just been hired or have been on board for decades, your colleagues are buzzing like a beehive with topics that are important to them. By teasing the heartfelt issues, convictions and exciting stories out of them, your fellow campaigners will feel heard. If, in the next step, you share your story with the rest of the team according to the rules of the art of storytelling, you will strengthen mutual understanding for each other and thus also the cohesion within the company itself.

2. Nothing beats authenticity

Similar to the game “Whispering Mail”, a story can also change quite a bit if it is heard through enough ears and then not told 100 percent correctly. With storylistening, on the other hand, you enter into a direct dialog with your colleagues and hear about their experiences straight from their mouths – it doesn’t get more authentic than that. Every detail of the story is genuine and unfiltered. A bonus point: If you record the exchange, you can listen to the audio file again afterwards. On their basis, you will also hit the nail on the head authentically when telling the story – regardless of the form.

3. Passion is contagious

Excitement, anger, hope – real stories are always full of emotion. Instead of simply being bombarded with rational facts, the audience shares in the heroine’s or hero’s experiences. They can’t help it, because they are emotionally involved in the story and will engage with it much more intensively as a result. Passion is contagious, so your colleagues often become storytellers themselves and take the story further out into the world. Some also feel inspired to share their own experiences.

Conclusion: Jump in at the Deep End, it will be Worth it!

Don’t be put off by the high proportion of freestyle in the storylistening! Even if every session is a very individual matter, your innate curiosity will point you in the right direction during the conversation. Once polished into shape, the glittering facets of the stories will also inspire the rest of your team.

Would you like to try out storylistening for your team? Then perhaps our storylistening sessions are just the thing for you. Click here for the offer “Corporate Campfires: Team building with storytelling”