What’s the story at CEMEX UK?

Storytelling skills and techniques key to company’s innovative new health and safety programme

ALL day, every day, people tell stories. It is one of the most effective ways of communicating with each other. This powerful tool of storytelling is the key to a new health and safety training programme being carried out by CEMEX UK.

The programme uses the skills and techniques employed by the charity Cardboard Citizens, who use theatre and storytelling to engage homeless people and help them to change attitudes and develop confidence.

The number one CEMEX health and safety rule is ‘look after yourself and each other’, and the new training aims to enable managers and supervisors to pass on this and other health and safety messages in an engaging way.

According tor Cardboard Citizens, persuasive storytelling is about taking information and building it into a memorable tale, often using personal experiences related to relevant real-life experiences. In this way the audience relates to and remembers it.

The facilitators of Cardboard Citizens have already worked with groups of 20 CEMEX employees at five workshops to hone the individuals’ storytelling and communications skills. This involved helping them to project their personalities and showing them how to pace a story with pauses and gestures.

‘People are very comfortable at telling everyday anecdotes with energy and enthusiasm, but lose this vitality and passion when delivering a corporate message. In this case, a very important message that can save a life,’ commented Adrian Jackson, artistic director and founder of Cardboard Citizens.

Andy Taylor, health and safety director with CEMEX UK, commented: ‘This is a truly innovative way of passing on our very important health and safety messages and ensuring we are the best for our employees. Year on year the number of incidents is decreasing and our challenge is ensuring we engage with all our employees to reduce the incidents to zero.

‘Storytelling can help to illustrate to team members how important it is to remember our number one ‘safety essential’ – to look out for each other and encourage each other to work safely in what can be very hazardous conditions.’

Recently, Cardboard Citizens has coached three CEMEX employees in the skills required to actually deliver this training. It is intended that these employees will support Cardboard Citizens with further workshop sessions in 2014, helping to embed the principles of persuasive storytelling throughout the business.