Creativity in HR | Frequently Asked Questions

Human Resources Departments are literally the first stop for any jobseeker – and the last stop for any employee on the way out the door. Tens of thousands of companies are clamoring for quality candidates in a climate where dream jobs are just a click away.

It is absolutely crucial to keep pace with the innovation, personalization, and creative solutions that a younger generation of job hunters expect. Also, in a culture that increasingly looks to storytelling and narrative structure as an approachable and reliable source of information, its key that HR has a hand in crafting and curating the stories that people see first.

And by making an effort to invest in creative content for everyday HR practices like onboarding, training, and learning and development, the impact of storytelling is amplified even further. According to Gallup, 56% of “somewhat disengaged” and 73% of “actively disengaged” employees are already looking for their next job.

How best to engage your employees? Tell them a story! 

Take a page from your company’s marketing department, and come up with a strategy.

Especially if you are making the leap from straightforward, by-the-book HR to a more creative approach, it’s important to have a plan in place. Yoh has an excellent blog post on best practices for coming up with your strategy.

Essentially, determine who you want to reach, the preferred platform or medium to reach them on, set a defined schedule, and be sure to leave room for plenty of collaboration and communication as you get your creative content for HR underway. 

Maybe you don’t even feel ready to come up with a full-on strategy, and that’s okay.

Start with one aspect of the HR department – pick something where you already have some form of content creation going on. Employee training is a good one. So is recruitment.

Then experiment with infusing a little creativity into your existing content.

For example, switch up the downloadable PDF for a training seminar with an interactive video. Or look to some of these fantastic examples of how companies have leveraged Twitter for recruiting.

Start gradually, and be sure to measure your results. 

Creativity is naturally associated with taking risks and being more comfortable with grey areas. On the other hand, the HR Department is naturally associated with ensuring black and white compliance to the company handbook and fostering an environment of safety and success. Luckily, the two can coexist- it’s just important to keep it balanced.

Creativity is simply a means of innovation, and doesn’t always need to imply lax or informal behavior. 

For example, certain topics or workplace processes may lend themselves well to a concise and clear infographic. Consider those topics were formerly communicated via a text-heavy poster that hung in the break room and never got read.

What if it were transformed into an infographic that was easily understood at a glance? It could be shared on the company Yammer, in a handout, or on a smaller refrigerator magnet. Then, not only was greater creativity achieved, but better communication (and hopefully employee adoption) was the result. 

The Learning and Development areas of HR have historically been the domain of lengthy webinars, presentations, and workbooks.

These areas are ripe for transformation as well. Dense information or even sensitive topics can be better retained via interactive video, gamification, or even virtual reality experiences.

Again, the content doesn’t necessarily need to change, but by being more engaging and interactive in your approach, you’ll benefit from higher employee engagement, and increased information retention. Consider combining a variety of materials driven by the same content to appeal to the diversity of learners within your organization as well. Target visual learners with videos and VR; the same scripts, with a few slight modifications, could be used for a podcast or a blogpost that will broaden your reach. 

Let’s return to the idea of storytelling as central to a company’s communication success.

It’s been proven that a theme of recurring customers is their investment in the company’s story. The same concept applies to people looking for a job. And once those people are hired, they’ll be looking for evidence that the stories they were told before and during the hiring process ring true.

As CMI puts it, you must ensure that your employees see your story as credible – after all, they’re the ones regularly telling it to potential customers or collaborators. 

So, at least at the beginning of a creative HR strategy, the most important thing to remember is that you should tell the same story to your employees that you want your clients or customers to hear. Be authentic, be innovative, and be direct in your communication. And once you have that foundational story, build a creative frame upon it.

Another related (and important) thing to remember: make sure you set goals for your creative content, and measure against those goals to see where you need to shift your strategy or modify your medium.

Happy you asked! From recruitment to employee benefits, to work/life balance, the impact that an HR department’s creativity can make on workplace culture is infinite.

Some companies make modifications to the physical space the employees are working in.

Others throw hiring parties instead of job fairs.

You could create an art wall, or come up with a team t-shirt.

Experiment with flexible work hours, or remote work, or adding videos to your job descriptions.

Create channels for employee communication like newsletters or social sites.

Once you begin developing a culture defined by creativity, you may find its momentum unstoppable.