Hybrid Mentoring for Junior Staff?Success
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
Named "Office Whisperer" by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with hybrid work and Generative AI | 7X Best-selling Author | HBR, Fortune, Forbes, Inc. | Behavioral scientist | Proud Ukrainian
Picture this: a large tech company decides to bring employees back to the office, believing that this will encourage mentoring and support organizational continuity. For example, consider what Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in Spring 2023 on the “On With Kara Swisher ” podcast: “For our new employees who are coming in, we know empirically that they do better if they’re in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained. If they are at home and not going through that process, we don’t think they’re as successful.”
That’s why Salesforce decided to change its policy from its previous fully flexible model: for example, the company’s Chief People Officer, Brent Hyder, wrote in a September 2022 company blog post that “at Salesforce, we’ve never had office mandates, and we never will.” However, in the Spring of 2023, Salesforce demanded that sales and marketing staff come to the office four days a week. We’re seeing many tech , finance , and other leaders make similar claims and adopt similar policies.
Certainly, these changes at Salesforce and other companies represent well-intentioned moves trying to develop the careers and performance of junior staff. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that they are misguided in the post-pandemic world. The result? Resentful senior staff, lackluster mentoring, and a suboptimal work environment. Here’s why, and how to fix it.
The Broken Osmosis Strategy: When Senior Staff Feel Resentment
Many leaders, driven by their memories of pre-pandemic times, believe that forcing employees to return to the office will naturally lead to mentoring and development. However, the pandemic has shown senior staff that they can be highly productive outside the office, and many of them now resist the idea of returning. When I ran focus groups while helping 23 companies figure out their return to office and hybrid work arrangements, I found that many senior staff forced to return to the office often come in, put on headphones, and avoid interacting with anyone, effectively nullifying the intended osmosis effect.
For instance, consider a regional insurance company where senior staff, feeling resentful about the forced return, became less available for mentoring, leading to junior staff struggling to adapt to their new roles and responsibilities. The insurance company’s productivity and employee morale took a hit as a result.
The Mentoring Mismatch: Rewarding Soft Skills Over Technical Abilities
The forced return to the office can lead to a disparity in mentoring. The focus groups revealed that the only junior staff receiving mentoring in this “forced return” scenario were those with strong initiative and social skills. Unfortunately, this approach leaves those who need mentoring the most?—?employees lacking social skills and initiative?—?in the cold. After all, the ones who need mentoring most are the ones without strong initiative and social skills, since mentoring helps develop these soft skills. Moreover, strong social skills often don’t correlate to the ability to do the technical job well: thus, the ones who do get mentoring are often the ones with great soft skills, but weaker technical skills.
Consider the case of a large professional services firm where this exact situation unfolded. The employees who benefited from the forced return were those who could navigate social interactions adeptly, while the technically skilled but socially awkward employees were left behind.
In a late-stage SaaS startup, a similar situation occurred. The employees with outstanding interpersonal skills managed to secure the attention of senior staff, while their colleagues with strong technical skills but weaker social aptitude struggled to obtain the mentoring they needed. This imbalance can lead to a skills gap that hampers the overall performance of the organization.
The Path Forward: Hybrid Mentoring Programs
Instead of forcing everyone to return to the office and hoping for osmosis-driven mentoring, it’s imperative to create a hybrid mentoring program that encompasses in-person and virtual mentoring elements. Such a program has been successfully implemented for several of my clients, such as the companies mentioned earlier. The result was happier senior staff and more effective mentoring.
Why are senior staff more willing to come to the office to do mentoring rather than through a mandate? Well, my focus groups with senior staff showed that they overwhelmingly realized the value of in-person mentoring: not only did they get in-person mentoring themselves, but they also recognized that in-person connection is very important for building trust. It allows junior people to be vulnerable when they ask questions that reveal vulnerability.
Such a policy does not require indiscriminate mandates of return to office for three to five days a week: instead, it requires people to be in the office for certain set tasks. Senior staff are much happier and more likely to support and have buy-in into coming to the office and doing mentoring gladly when they know they have a good reason to be in the office for a mentoring meeting. They are not going to be nearly as resentful as for what feels to them like an arbitrary mandated office return informed by biased thinking reflective of pre-pandemic realities, which results in resistance, attrition, disengagement, and morale problems among senior employees.
By contrast, established employees feel that their individual and specific expertise and contributions are being valued when they are asked to come to the office specifically to do a mentoring meeting; moreover, they end up spending less time in the office if they do several mentoring meetings a week than if they have to be in the office for a full three to five days. Thus, company leaders get what they want, senior staff get what they want, and junior employees get what they want: a win-win-win for all.
领英推荐
Key Components of a Successful Hybrid Mentoring Program
From my experience, a hybrid mentoring program requires several key activities:
Successful mentoring programs involve a number of important guiding principles:
A Bold New Approach for a Post-Pandemic World
The key takeaway? Forcing employees back to the office in hopes of fostering mentoring through osmosis is a relic of the past. In a world where remote and hybrid work are now the norm, it’s time to adapt and implement hybrid mentoring programs that cater to the needs of both senior and junior staff. Embrace this bold new approach, and watch your organization thrive in the face of change.
Key Take-Away
Forced office returns for mentoring risk resentment and skill imbalances. Hybrid mentoring programs offer flexibility, inclusivity, and genuine development opportunities… >Click to tweet
Image credit: Mikael Blomkvist/pexels
Originally published in Disaster Avoidance Experts
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Your clear mentorship expectations and guidelines ensure POSITIVE and PRAGMATIC reasons to work from the office regularly, and that goes for senior and junior staff. One advantage of the tug-of-war on #RTO is that it has illuminated management gaps, both pre- and post-Covid, and mentorship is definitely one of those gaps.?
Assistant Director & Principal Analyst | Fostering the Digital Work State Experience to Facilitate Employee Flexibility and Engagement to Sustainably Connect Talent and Technology
7 个月Even pre-covid the office occupancy wasn’t at 100% and mentoring also needed alignment. So, what’s the new news?
Arquiteta do Futuro do Trabalho | Modelos, Espa?os e Futuro do trabalho possíveis e sustentáveis | Criatividade, ESG, mobilidade e cidades inteligentes
7 个月Huge pain point for remote companies, thanks for sharing this great article Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
Health and Safety Consultant | HSE Manager | HSSE Director | HSEQ Vice President | Interim Manager | Expert Witness
7 个月To be effective mentoring needs to be done in a structured manner, however there is no evidence that “face to face” meetings improve the sucess of a mentoring program. I have coached and mentored young HSE professionals in many countries, with out ever meeting many of them in person. Mentoring is not a valid reason to try and force people into an office unnecessarily. Many professional organisations offer virtual mentoring programs these days that are highly regarded and very successful.