Embracing a culture of mentoring for the next generation
Human resources is broken. It’s outdated, process oriented and disliked by most of your employees.
There. I said it.
When I started my career as an 18 year old bright eyed and bushy tailed cadet at KPMG, I was enthusiastic about the opportunities that lay ahead of me. Although I never envisaged being partner, the path to that role was clearly defined and everyone knew what it took to get there.
Today, things have changed, and organisations can no longer expect or dictate that their employees toe the line and follow the traditional career path.
The way in which employees work and want to work has significantly shifted in the last five years. Driven by a number of factors — generational, technological and economical — people want to work in more collaborative environments and take responsibility for their own learning and development.
People no longer map out a rigid 20 year career map.
Instead, they seek learning outcomes that correspond to their individual needs now, or in six to 12 months’ time.
In 2014, organisations spent an average of $1208 per employee on training and development in Australia, but this investment is failing to make an impact, particularly on early to mid-career employees. Why?
Because organisations are implementing learning and development activities that don’t align with how their next generation of employees want to engage and learn at work.
The assumption that younger employees are disengaged and reluctant to accept feedback couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, a report by the Harvard Business Review found that instead of receiving feedback based on an arbitrary date set through the performance management process — 80% of millennials expect and want continuous coaching and feedback throughout the year.
With advances in technology, many organisations are now implementing real time engagement surveys so they can get an immediate reading on culture and engagement across the organisation. This approach is enabling leaders and HR teams to get direct insight into how their employees are feeling, as well as what these employees need in order to be more engaged and productive at work.
This scenario showcases the strength of the ‘bottom up’ approach, where your people drive your people strategy; rather than a ‘top down’ approach where learning is pushed upon them.
It’s through this feedback loop that many organisations are uncovering the latent demand for mentoring within their workforce, which is mirrored in our experience with clients. When companies take a firm-wide approach to mentoring, and make mentoring accessible to all people within their organisation, they find their mentoring programs deliver an 80% over-subscription rate.
In the U.S., there is a strong mentoring culture promoted across organisations, with over 71% of Fortune 500 companies running mentoring programs. In Australia however, less than 1 in 5 organisations run a mentor program, and of those that do, it often defers back to a siloed, elitist approach — not accessible or offered to all.
Mentoring is not a new concept; however, traditional perceptions of how it is deployed, particularly in leadership circles, need to be challenged and in some cases — retired.
Mentoring has evolved from a traditional hierarchal one-way relationship, to one that is now seen by both parties as being mutually beneficial. It’s moved beyond boardrooms and old boys’ networks to something that should be embraced as an organisational wide people engagement and development strategy, especially as the millennial workforce takes over.
Today’s leaders need to capitalise on their greatest resource. They need to move beyond the bottom line and take more responsibility for how they can impact people engagement and performance throughout the entire organisation. It is no longer about talent management and improved processes — it is now about people management and how we can we make life at work better. Creating a culture of mentoring is the first step in trying to achieve this.
