Make Your New Hire Training Course Fun With Storytelling
Storytelling establishes a positive link with your employees through impactful and easy-to-digest content. It also helps your team members comprehend the company's culture and the tangible ways in which its values come into play on a daily basis. Below, you can find 5 creative ways to embed storytelling in your new hire training course and reap the benefits.
5 Tips To Include Storytelling In Your New Hire Training Strategy
1. Virtual Or On-Site Tours
Depending on the company's budget, the nature of the position, and the location of your headquarters, a great way to incorporate storytelling into your new employee's training course is through a tour of the grounds. Include a route with stops around the office in your training curriculum; you can detail the origins, anecdotes, and vision behind the organization. Whether on or offline, a tour greatly benefits a new hire looking to get their bearings, and it's a great way to retain information by connecting stories to tangible things and spaces. You can even switch tour guides every few stops to encourage engagement from multiple departments and employees.
2. Backstory
How did a mere idea transform into a company with objectives, successes, staff, and clients? While the company's origin is probably published on a website for the world to see, it is also important to share lesser-known facts about your organization. What were the obstacles and the challenges? Who did you turn to for help? Share the inside bits of the company's journey to present a relatable story that establishes an empathic connection between employer and employee and focuses on lived experience and everyday challenges. Success stories are always valuable to know, but they are rarely as profoundly relatable as daily struggles.
3. Employee's Backstory
Starting a new job means you will have to introduce yourself multiple times, either on a department or a peer-to-peer level. Give your employee the chance to make the rules and choose their own preferred method of introducing themselves, their work and achievements, as well as their objectives. Allow them to delve deeper into their personal interests and their role models. Ask them to detail their journey as if presenting a memoir to be published—they can make it fun, dramatic, suspenseful, or tear-inducing. Break the ice and introduce them to a casual environment of active listeners and empaths.
4. Interactive Progression
You can choose your own adventure or decide between alternative endings depending on your previous choices. What better way to exercise decision-making skills and accountability? By creating an interactive learning environment with multiple potential paths and collectible progress points, your employees will have an opportunity to show initiative and creativity and put their skills into practice. That is a fun way to obtain and retain information, especially if the learning environment is customizable enough to reflect your organization's workplace.
5. Accessible Storytelling
An important component of making a new hire training course digestible is including different media types. While pictures don't always speak for themselves and large bodies of text require concentration, time, and effort, a multimedia approach to the training course may solve a lot of problems. It is important that the information comes in bite-sized portions with concise and easy-to-review language. To make your storytelling accessible, ensure that the training course can support assistive technology, is easily digestible for different attention spans, and that its narrative follows a clear start-to-finish path. Setting up a reward system when finishing a training unit can be a great way to mark progress and set achievements within the story's narrative.
Conclusion
The best thing about using storytelling in your new hire training course is that the possibilities end where your imagination does. You can choose any setting, media, or piece of tech to provide your new employees with an interactive, scenario-based training curriculum. Alternatively, you can utilize your resources to inspire, train, and engage your new addition to become part of the organization's culture by equipping them with inside knowledge and backstories. Constructing a new hire training course means that there are multiple action plans to create and follow. You can use storytelling to make that process much more enjoyable, entertaining, and emotionally centered.
