The narrative of an organisation can explain what the company does or a more complex and nuanced explanation of its mission and vision. In either case, it should be clear and concise enough to fit on one page. This is not just for internal use, it’s also something that people outside the company will see and understand.

The best way for you to create your company narrative is by starting with your core values. You should know these already. This should be printed on every single thing you send out and being posted in every location where people interact with your brand.

Once you have written those core values, think about how they connect with each other. Look out for any patterns, common threads between them, and how they make sense together. Then write everything that comes up in response to those questions. This will form the structure of your organisation’s narrative.

Organisations narrative is an organisation’s ruling statement, its telling the story of a relationship between the organisation’s identity and organisation’s direction. In HR, this will not be the typical story telling through the public relations tool. This is the story told by your employees in their day-to-day interactions.

It is critical to think about the story that your employee tells through their daily work interactions. We have read on many social media pages of how customers have seen your employees behave and attitudes at the workplace. The question is whether this aligns with your organisation’s values and at what point to you draw the line between an employee’s behaviour being interpreted as the organisation’s behaviour.

Interacting with the organisation’s social media pages is one way of finding out how the organisation is perceived and how the people in charge of these pages interact with others. An audit of the organisation’s image on the social media would be a significant area of improvement. Especially where the organisation wants to maintain a certain image or with a negative image that needs to be repaired.

How are your interactions in the social media perceived? We have read how your SM page administrators answer queries raised on your social media pages. Training on organisation narrative should be part of practises of onboarding and annual improvement trainings. This way, the ideas refreshed within an employees’ life cycle on the organisation.

Benefits of a great company narrative is that it helps employees align to organisations goals and values and it persuades stakeholders to work with your organisation. A narrative told consistently and in context will relay an organisation’s identity and direction.