Using Visual Storytelling in HR
Hand-Drawn Content, Handcrafted for Human Resources
Human resources professionals face a seemingly never-ending list of challenging situations. In an atmosphere of constant change, they are required to process and distribute tons of information with efficiency and accuracy. They’re responsible for handling confidential, often sensitive situations with empathy and professionalism. Any HR job is a balancing act between what is documented in black and white, and what lives in a grey area. Why not add some color with hand-drawn content?
Hand-drawn content is the ideal solution for some of the most confounding challenges in the HR industry.
Challenge: Speed to Pivot
Relevant information that’s consistently current.
Hand-drawn videos and infographics can be produced relatively efficiently and can be scaled to meet HR needs as they evolve, making it a perfect fit for company updates, handbook refreshers, and especially learning and development. Hand-drawn content is not only fully customized during production, it’s easily customized in post-production—solving the dilemma of maintaining evergreeen HR content while addressing the need for updating when changes in rules and regulations, processes, or company policies arise.
Challenge: Employee Engagement
Ensuring employees learn and remember key ideas.
Employee engagement can have a significant impact on company culture, as well as a company’s bottom line. The human resources industry is full of information and fine print. While completely necessary, presenting this glut of info can become stale pretty quickly, leading to employee boredom and lack of attention.
Hand-drawn content fosters engagement by giving timeworn topics a fresh look, grabbing attention with an easily understood visual language that sparks the imagination and boosts retention.
- Share processes or procedures with hand-drawn infographics than can be digitally disseminated plus printed out as posters or handouts.
- Illustrate organizational changes or structure.
- Rely upon the creativity and novelty of hand-drawn content to gain interest
- Benefit from the neuroscience behind remembering complex ideas via imagery vs. walls of text.
Challenge: Wide-ranging Topics
Addressing a diverse array of material in a variety of ways.
There is no one-size-fits all approach to human resources content; the topics covered are often just too vast and nuanced to fit neatly into content categories. Hand-drawn infographics or whiteboard animation videos give HR professionals a versatile, flexible tool to communicate a range of information specific to Training and HR, like process, abstract concepts, knowledge, values, and SOPs. Video is on the rise as an effective way to teach and inform in HR. Plus, hand-drawn content doesn’t need to stay confined to print and digital—consider professional graphic facilitators to bring a creative element to classrooms with live drawing, or to capture pertinent topics by illustrating a CEO keynote address.
Challenge: Keep your audience interested over time.
Multi-media videos can become a cornerstone of your curriculum or training library. Video is also ideal for topic summaries or to present new campaigns. It can even be a handy recruiting tool.
Use hand-drawn digital boarding to create a more dynamic experience during webinars, training sessions, or team meetings. Switch up formats depending on the scenario, while relying on the common thread of hand-drawn content an audience will trust because of the human element.
Hand-drawn content can be especially useful for sensitive, controversial, or personal topics frequently encountered in the realm of HR.
The use of metaphor, iconic imagery, or neutral scenes can be more widely understood and accepted than live footage (which can be too realistic or biased), or traditional animation, which is ill-suited to serious topics.
Hand-drawn content has a unique capability to distill complex ideas into easily digestible content. It’s well-suited to creating a story from a set of dry topics or procedural jargon. When it comes to employee engagement, change management, and training, hand-drawn content is ideal.
As part of a long-term initiative, or in concert with an overall content strategy, HR and hand-drawn content goes hand in hand.