How The Story Board can help you
The Story Board offers you an ongoing series of customizable articles on subjects common to the experience of working in today’s corporate world. Easy-reading stories by award-winning business journalists, they offer a national or even global perspective on each topic, but come packed with options and tips to help you fit each story into your company’s environment and make it read as if written for, by and about your company.
If you do an electronic (or print) newsletter for employees, these will fit right in. If not, consider this: Each story comes with an optional guide to help supervisors hold team meetings on that topic. Just send them this guide, with a copy of the article they can print and distribute ahead of the meeting.
And just look at the benefits you get from using our stories!
Builds balance.
If your employee communications focus on your company alone – its issues, its people and subjects critical to getting its work done – that’s understandable. It’s just not enough. There’s another large category of topics your people care about, that directly affect their engagement and performance, that you’re probably leaving out.
Raises relevance.
This category of content is personal and popular. It concerns how to get the most from the social experience of working – how and why to get along with the boss, make friends on the job, cope with stress, live the brand, be a good teammate and other aspects of a satisfactory work life. If you aren’t addressing this side of employee needs, you may be out of touch with your audience.
Compounds credibility.
Since these issues are common across work forces almost everywhere, they’re well studied, with plenty of advice available from third-party experts and anecdotes about other people’s experiences. Showing your workers this broad perspective on what might otherwise look like a local problem can help diffuse hard feelings. It also lends weight to self-help advice that might not seem credible offered by company spokespersons alone.
Whittles workload.
You and your trusted writers are experts on your company, immersed in its issues, and probably stretched thin. Adding this Workplace beat and the research it requires might seem daunting. But because these shared personal issues affect employee engagement just as much as the company-specific agenda you’re covering now, you could make a strategic trade: a little less labor-intensive original reporting, a bit more well-written, syndicated material you can edit with ease – with no loss of strategic impact. You might just free up a weekend to spend with family.
Curbs costs.
Those staff and especially free lance hours you’ve been putting in almost surely cost more per story than you’d spend with The Story Board. Try this test: Figure your per-hour cost for original reporting; then estimate the number of hours needed to research, write (and edit) one story. Add to this the cost of commissioning an original illustration to interpret that article. Now consider: If the resulting story comes to you polished to Wall Street Journal standards, and your illustrator is someone Time Magazine also uses – and the final package has cost you less than $525 – you may not need us. Otherwise, multiply your savings by the eight-to-10 workplace stories you really should be doing per year, and let’s talk.
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