Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Employee Engagement: A Literary Approach to HR Communication in the Age of AI

Abstract

This article delivers an analytical piece on the concept of digital stories as an employee engagement tool in information-overloaded workplace environments and suggests an ethical, empirically testable model of HR communication in an AI world. The secondary qualitative review will synthesize peer reviewed and practitioner literature published between 2010 and 2025 and will involve illustrative analysis of publicly available internal artifacts. At work, stories have seven themes that describe their functioning. Stories construct meaning by connecting tasks to strategy, voice and co creation, more autonomy, and a sense of belonging, decisions in literary craft, character, setting, conflict, arc, motif, and tone determine identities, platform affords determine reach and depth, AI can enhance ideation, captions, and localization, and authenticity demands the provision of disclosure, consent, provenance, and accessibility, and the role of measurement is triangulation of pulse items, qualitative comments, and behavioral traces. A Literary HR Communication Model is presented in the paper that fits storycraft, engagement levers, channel and cadence, AI workflow and human editorial stewardship, and governance and ethics. A five-stage roadmap is used to guide Diagnose, Design, Develop, Deploy, and Measure. The review relates the literary studies, HR and internal communication, and HCI and AI, elucidates the mechanisms, and provides practical guardrails that help to present credible, inclusive stories.