What should our employee inclusion stories show?

Employee inclusion stories should make room for different accounts of working life, including past difficulties, future hopes and experiences that connect people. For IBM's 2020 diversity and inclusion campaign, employees were filmed talking directly to camera about those subjects. Authenticity and humility were central to the approach, with design intended to foreground inclusion rather than overshadow employees' accounts.

The practical lesson is to let individual experiences carry the story rather than make every employee illustrate the same corporate message. A story can celebrate employees while still acknowledging the difficulties they have faced. In 2026, Diversity Council Australia found that 35% of Australian workers described their manager as inclusive, compared with 56% describing their team and 59% describing their organisation as inclusive. Those different perspectives make room for an important storytelling distinction: an account of the organisation is not interchangeable with an account of someone's everyday experience.

Credible inclusion storytelling requires diversity of thought and representation among the people shaping the work, as well as those featured. Representation matters throughout development: in the thinking that informs the brief, the team proposing the idea, and the choice of images and authors. The practical test is not simply whether a campaign shows different people, but whether different perspectives have helped determine what the campaign says.

Challenge assumptions about whose experience deserves attention and whether a different demographic could carry the story equally well or better. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in 2026, employees may withhold experiences when speaking up feels risky or futile, and power differences particularly inhibit accounts that challenge established views, making safe channels important for underrepresented groups. Employee silence therefore deserves attention alongside visible participation when deciding whose experiences are represented.