The App That Can Revolutionize Your Storytelling

Storytelling is becoming ever more important in differentiating your brand from your competitors; thankfully, platforms like Culture HQ make it increasingly easy for employees to offer their voice. We talked with founder Brian Vigeant to find out more about the future of employer brand storytelling.

“Everything has become more personal,” offers Brian when considering what has changed in recent years. “You have people that were thrown into this crazy Zoom life where you're at home with your kids and pets, so everything has become more personal with who we are. Before, there was a very strong work/life separation. Now there’s much more work/life integration, and people are looking to connect on a more personal level.”

The change has both positives and pitfalls. From an employer branding perspective, many employers are no longer able to use the aesthetics and perks of their office environment to differentiate their brand from their competitors – instead, they must increasingly rely on their employees to display the culture that will attract new talent.

But on the more positive side, as Brian notes, employers are now able to draw upon new elements of its employees’ experience. “Because you have opportunities to work with people all across the globe as a result of remote working, that allows the power of stories to connect people in more inclusive or intentional ways.”

Storytelling through employer branding allows companies to celebrate the commonalities amongst their employee base - be it their hobbies, their passions, their character or their nationality - and increase the bond between remote workers, regardless of the distance between them.

“Stories are going to really be an important aspect to bring people closer together," says Brian. “Everyone's so divided, in so many ways… Stories have that opportunity to cross the chasm and bring people together, if we can really just showcase that in a more intentional way.”

Culture HQ looks to be exactly that, a platform to reach out to all employees and collect their stories with an easy, approachable interface.

The App to Bridge the Divide

Available as both an app and a web platform, Culture HQ allows the user to send ‘prompts’ to employees – or different groupings of employees based on sector, location or any other number of characteristics. These prompts look to inspire employees to offer their best stories on a given subject: a celebration, perhaps, or a team-building exercise. Brian suggests a ‘day in the life of an employee’, from getting up to jumping into bed – the possibilities are limitless.

Employees can then use the in-built image and video editors to record themselves or take photos, tweak the footage and then send it on so that it can be considered for the company’s culture page, a featured selection of the responses that are picked by the company and can be displayed in collages or highlight reels.

“Most of the other vendors in this area are just like a video testimonial-type platform, where an employee records themselves on like, why they love the company, or what's the benefit that resonates with them,” says Brian. “That's the majority of tools that exist, a one-dimensional style of content. And then they have usually one way to display that content.

But for us, what we're doing is more of like an Instagram or TikTok style of content. This style usually drives more adoption because there's sharing and commenting, and it's helping people feel warm and fuzzy as you're sharing content. It's not just like a transactional ‘send me a video on this’ and that's it. It's much more of an experience, which makes it fun to contribute.”

Culture HQ also give the client multiple formats of how they can then distribute or display that content. If a company want their collected stories to be displayed in a company landing page, Culture HQ have prebuilt templates that they can use to spotlight different stories. Integration with other platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams and LinkedIn further ensure that the employee stories can be viewed on as many different mediums as possible.

The result is an approachable system that engages the employee and removes many of the typical barriers to collecting voices around the company. “These employer brand leaders are finding that it's so difficult to get content from employees… Usually, it's like, I can't get them to go to a Google Drive folder, or I can’t get them to use a Word document. It's too slow.

“Archaic and manual processes without a singular, easy-to-use platform are holding employees back from sharing their voices, and now we can play a role in helping companies to capture content in a continuous way and feed it across all channels.”