Hello Future: Making mentoring as easy as ABC

Helping to raise little people can be a big job, and for new preschool teachers, it can be overwhelming. It helps to have a steady hand to show you the ropes, but in a room full of toddlers, that hand is often being held by someone else.

When a well-established preschool group turned to EON Consulting’s Jek Wong and her team to better harness experienced senior teachers as leaders and mentors, they had to be guided by that reality. In fact, the human resources consultant gamely volunteers that their Zoom interviews with the preschool about their challenges were not without some exuberant interruptions.

“Preschool teachers are already bogged down by operations, from childcare and administrative work to health checks and government-related documentation,” Jek explains. “We had to find a way to free up time for mentoring while ensuring the day-to-day work got done.” Early Childhood Care and Education is among the areas of focus of her firm.

Because the job redesign pilot would potentially be executed across the group’s 5 centres, the approach also had to be as simple as, well, ABC.

After speaking to both the management and teachers, Jek’s team worked through the teachers' existing tasks, figuring out what could be shed or shared. They then created the tools that would make mentorship a formal part of their job, and easier to execute.

Learning plans for key roles were created, as were templates to guide mentors through the process of coaching newbies across a variety of situations, instead of simply providing solutions. “Talking to parents, for instance, is something teachers have to do, and some are not as confident as others. Walking newer teachers through that can ease them into it,” says Jek.

Further suggestions on how to put the plans into practice were also made, including how to split mentoring duties so enough teachers remained operationally available. Possible career progression pathways for senior teachers and mentors were also charted. To make the role more attractive to jobseekers, job descriptions were also updated to capture how the role had evolved, and prospects enhanced.

Alongside the senior teacher role, the Human Resources role was also broadened so it would go beyond recruitment and administration to also oversee coaching and leadership training efforts.

Moves to improve talent management are especially important given the growing competition for talent, Jek points out. Last October, the government said wages for early childhood educators in government-supported preschools would go up by 10 to 30% over the next 2 years. The attrition rate for the sector stands between 10% and 15%.

Teachers are ultimately no different from new hires in any sector – if effort is put into ensuring they learn to do their jobs better and growing their confidence, they are less likely to leave, says Jek. And the way to that may actually be within reach, she adds.

“Your staff may have the experience and talent to help you achieve your goals, their jobs just have to be designed to harness that.”

EON Consulting is among the consultants pre-approved by Workforce Singapore (WSG) to help companies redesign jobs and tackle manpower and productivity issues. Up to 70% of the cost can be funded through the Support for Job Redesign under Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG-JR). For more information about PSG-JR, click on the link below.

Read more in our Hello Future series

1. A Critical Time to Relook Jobs. In our curtain raiser piece, job redesign consultants shared why companies need to move now on jobs to protect their top- and bottom-lines.
2. Elevating Patient Service, by Design. Jia Yong of Ernst & Young Advisory Pte. Ltd showed a local private hospital how job redesign can be a powerful tool to solve its recruitment and productivity issues.
3. Reconstructing Construction Roles. Nellie of BDO Consultants is leading the transformation of the project coordination role in the construction industry to help ensure projects get completed on time.
4. Designing for Design Roles. Dominic of SFIC Institute showed a mid-sized furniture and furnishings firm how job redesign can let them achieve cost savings of about 20 percent.
5. Perfecting the fit in fashion roles. June of Singapore Polytechnic and Ke Le of AON Solutions Singapore supported two different fashion labels with the job redesign support needed to expand overseas and keep up with omnichannel pressures.
6. The Best Talent can Come from Within. Adeline of Cadence Group highlighted the need for a family-run photo-printing shop to update the roles of its employees alongside technological advancements.
7. Getting Performance Management Right for Success. Johnson and Thomas of CET Global redesigned the HR Executive role in a Chinese manufacturing company to empower the staff to automate tasks and focus on impactful contributions.
8. Spicing up F&B Roles. Siling of Singapore Productivity Centre assisted a Japanese restaurant chain in redesigning jobs and streamlining operations during COVID-19 to achieve tantalising results.
9. What it is, and What it isn’t. In our summary piece, consultants bust some job redesign myths, and suggest how you can maximise the value you get from a job redesign project.