I work for Boeing Commercial Airplanes and we have many, many stories in our organization. While reading Denning's chapters on storytelling in an organization, I thought of a couple that might work for this reflection exercise. I kept in mind who told the story and who the audience was and how it has impacted our business unit.
The first story I thought of is actually a collection of three stories that are part of our "Ethics Commitment" series. The video is usually viewed by a team and their manager, a group of 10-15 people in a classroom environment. The video has stopping places for discussion points and everyone gets a "My Learning" credit at the end. These videos are shown once a year and last about an hour. The video is composed of three stories, each one a tale of someone who didn't follow the ethics training and was either dismissed or counselled. One such story is about a young man who worked in the Everett facility and was so excited about working there that he constantly took pictures of his workspace, the airplanes, and the inside of the facility. Boeing has a very strict photography policy for pretty understandable reasons, our facilities are full of proprietary information that if leaked, could give our biggest competition a leg up. So this young fella was taking all of these pictures and posting them on his Facebook page. One of his co-workers saw these pictures on the social media site and went to her manager for advice. The manager thanked her for letting him know and the enthusiastic young employee was counselled on the photography policy and let off with a warning. Another story is of an employee who was working in one of our Boeing Defense facilities and was spending an extreme amount of time on the internet...not working. His co-workers had to take up the slack and were very resentful. The co-workers talked about their frustrations in the cafeteria and decided to speak up to their manager. The manager went to Human Resources to find out what the options were for dealing with this situation and after pulling the search record from the employee's laptop, decided that he should no longer work there. This employee was terminated because he was using company time and resources for personal use and we all were thus warned.
Both of these stories do speak to who Boeing is as a company and what we stand for. Boeing wants us to be proud of where we work, and looks for teachable opportunities first then if necessary, termination of the employee. Boeing wants to be fair to all employees, union and non-represented but as shown in the Defense facility, time is money and we all need to put in our best effort every day to be successful as a whole organization. These videos come across as a bit corny, and are acted out by employees. But while we as a team are all kind of snickering at the cornball acting and dialog, we do all engage in the discussions that the storytelling encourages. This is happening all across Boeing so I think the impact on the organization is huge.
We do also have quality videos that go out and messages that come out about the same time as the quarterly earnings are announced. The quality videos are set up much the same way as the ethics videos with three or four stories of actual events and how they impacted the business and what can be done to avoid these quality issues. The discussions about earnings are usually sent out as an e-mail from our Vice-President or CEO and while they talk about the billions of dollars we made, they also talk about where that money goes and how it is distributed. The talk always turns to our competition and how we have to spend a certain way to protect our future. This is usually met with groans of disbelief in corporate transparencies. (Like most large companies I'm guessing!) In all of those examples, getting the message out to over 100,000 employees stationed all over the world, is a heady task at best and I personally applaud them for even trying!
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