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Career coaching   |   What Great Mentorship Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace
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Career coaching


WHAT GREAT MENTORSHIP LOOKS LIKE IN A HYBRID WORKPLACE

Ditch the virtual happy hour in favor of one-on-one chats.
by
 * Marianna Tu
   and
 * Michael Li

by
 * Marianna Tu
   and
 * Michael Li

May 12, 2021
Daniel Grizelj/Getty Images
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Summary.    In a time of incredible change, professional disruption, and
overwhelming loneliness, mentorship can anchor us. But how do we mentor in a
remote, distributed workforce? Coming together online doesn’t need to be the
watered-down version of...more
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Remote work has been an adjustment (to say the least) for everyone, and its
effect on our professional relationships has been just as significant as the
impact on daily tasks. For early-career employees, the lack of casual
conversations at work poses a considerable challenge. How does one learn best
practices to succeed in one’s career when you’re working alone from home? How
does one build the professional relationships that are critical for survival and
advancement? On the organizational side, how does the business build a culture
that supports diversity and inclusion initiatives in the middle of a pandemic?
Based on our recent experience leading organizations focused on online
mentorship, we believe an organizational commitment to mentorship can address
all of these issues.

At America Needs You (ANY) (where Marianna serves as CEO and Michael served on
the board), we fight for economic mobility and inclusion through a rigorous
one-on-one mentoring and career development program for first-generation college
students. We had to make a significant shift to our mentoring programs when they
suddenly went virtual. At The Data Incubator (TDI), which Michael founded, we
train the next generation of data scientists and have shifted our in-person
training and mentorship to online programs. This moment of disruption has been
the right time for us to build and support diverse talent from internships to
the C-suite, and we’d like to share what has worked for us as we moved our
mentorship programs from in-person to virtual programs.

Mentorship and sponsorship are critical to employee retention and satisfaction —
especially for people of color and women, both of whom are more likely than
others to report mentoring as very important to their career development. On the
retention side, mentorship supports employee development and progression. On the
recruiting side, involvement in undergraduate mentorship builds talent pipelines
and provides access to students who are often excluded from traditional
recruiting, such as students from a community college. Hiring mistakes and poor
employee support are always costly, but the stakes are even higher in today’s
environment. Mentoring helps us avoid both.

Insight Center Collection


BUILDING TOMORROW'S WORKFORCE

How the best companies identify and manage talent.

Decades of research have given us strong indicators of what works. Researchers
David Megginson and David Clutterbuck, cofounders of the European Mentoring
Center (now the European Mentoring & Coaching Council) point to two components
for effective mentoring: building rapport and creating clarity of purpose.


BUILDING RAPPORT

Rapport is what makes mentoring truly transformative and more than just an
organizational responsibility. But it is also particularly challenging to build
in a virtual world. We define rapport as mutual trust and respect, a shared
understanding of one another’s values and perspectives, and strong
communication. The quality of this human connection is critical to retaining
employees, especially for those who are underrepresented in your company or
industry. A study conducted by Gartner and Capital Analytics at Sun Microsystems
found much higher retention rates for mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than other
employees who did not participate in the mentoring program (49%). Here’s how to
go about building rapport:


TAKE A HOLISTIC MENTORING APPROACH.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, our personal and professional worlds have steadily
intruded into one another. Companies who embrace that reality will tend to keep
their best people while others lose great talent.

At ANY, we found that the key to building rapport was explicitly telling
mentor-mentee pairs that it they were not only allowed, but encouraged, to talk
about things other than work and academics. We also named new virtual norms that
embrace a holistic approach, such as “you never have to apologize for
interruptions from children and pets” to ease the stress of digital
interactions. This sort of mentoring acknowledges an important truth: work/life
balance is a myth; it’s all just life, and work is one part of our lives. The
inability to separate the two is rendered all the more evident as we work from
crowded homes with childcare demands clearly evident in the background.

Mentorship helps individuals connect their deeper human motivations and values
to their careers, and aligning these two will pay dividends to employers and
employees alike. According to Gallup, nearly 85% of employees worldwide are
still not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, despite greater effort
from companies. Loneliness is a concurrent pandemic, with 65% of young people in
a recent University of Miami study reporting increased loneliness since the
start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 80% reporting “significant depressive
symptoms.”

Mentoring can help us stay resilient and connected in the face of these
challenges. Different employers may need to draw different lines between their
personal and private lives, and the exact relationship will ultimately be up to
the mentor and mentee. But acknowledging how much our personal and professional
lives are intersecting is a powerful basis for any mentoring relationship.


DITCH THE HAPPY HOUR IN FAVOR OF ONE-ON-ONE RELATIONSHIPS.

Instead of focusing on individual relationships, many companies have tried to
manage connection during the pandemic through virtual group social events and
happy hours, only to have attendance plummet after a few months. Many report
fatigue around virtual group events.

Investing time in meaningful, deep connections with individuals one-on-one can
be a refreshing change and a chance for more authentic connection. Guided
dialogue and discussion questions will help mentoring pairs uncover their common
humanity — no matter how different they may seem on the surface. At TDI, we have
found that maintaining regular virtual one-on-ones provides a unique opportunity
for building rapport that isn’t possible in large group settings.

One of our most impactful virtual mentoring activities at ANY is having one
person speak for three uninterrupted minutes about their life story. These 180
seconds are profound; many cannot remember when they truly listened or were
listened to for that long. People who were strangers moments ago learned about
some of each other’s critical life moments, as people have shared stories about
the pain of professional or personal rejection, and other challenges in their
lives. You cannot talk meaningfully about careers without talking about the
source of our motivations, about family, and about life’s highs and lows.


OFFER MULTIPLE MODALITIES FOR CONNECTION.

People have different preferences for communication mediums, which often fall
along generational lines. Provide guidelines and options for communication (for
example, by showing people how to use Slack or Zoom, or proving guidance about
whether texting is encouraged or discouraged). Then, let mentoring pairs try and
see what works for them.

At ANY, one of the first things our pairs do is create a mentoring
“Communications and Expectations Plan” where they talk about how and when they’d
like to check-in. Teach people how to use technology in ways that build
connection, such as coaching mentor/mentee pairs on using annotations and
reactions in video chats or providing links to online assessments, tools, and
games that they can complete together.


EMBRACE THE ADVANTAGES (AND QUESTION THE PRESUMED LIMITATIONS) OF REMOTE
CONNECTION.

Coming together online doesn’t need to be the watered-down version of being
together in-person; some things are actually better because of — not in spite of
— being remote. Remote mentoring can promote equity and build relationships free
from the biases we face in person, when we know another’s height, physical
ability, or pregnancy status, to name a few examples.

Without the limiting factor of geographic proximity, you can expand your pool to
make great matches that prioritize shared interests and values over logistics.
You might find that by embracing the tools you have, you can build something
even more robust than before.

Train people on how to use technology to build connection and encourage digital
skill sharing. Remember that being virtual doesn’t mean you can’t use physical
objects or movement. Mailing a physical item can provide a much-needed tactile
anchor. Mentor/mentee pairs can open a package and enjoy the contents together
(cookies, notebooks, company swag, etc.) No budget? You can each find a similar
object in your respective homes (have a cup of coffee together) or do your
check-ins while each taking a walk.


CLARITY OF PURPOSE

Infusing a clear sense of purpose in the mentor/mentee relationship creates
excitement and momentum to solidify the relationship. Without it, mentorships
can become nice friendships, but will not help employees reach their goals. To
create clarity of purpose:


CREATE BENCHMARKS AND CELEBRATE WINS.

Humans are storytellers, and we need a narrative to make sense of our life’s
events. Mentoring pairs who spend time saying, “This is where we started, this
is how far we’ve come, and this is where we’re going,” will build resilience to
persevere through challenges. Pairs should set and check-in on goals, and should
create a public or semi-public forum to share progress. While these forums may
have happened informally in the office, companies need to proactively foster
digital equivalents in a remote office.

Posting videos and pictures of wins, and actively engaging with public or
private online forums, can promote a culture of celebration. Graphics, music,
and videos can mark milestones — for example, one of ANY’s sites changed their
traditional matching ceremony into a video with pictures of each pair, and we’ve
seen organizations effectively use online compliment books or “word clouds” to
inspire each other. At ANY, we also hold an open forum for “Public and Private
Victories” at the end of every workshop to verbally celebrate accomplishments,
share lessons learned, and publicly thank others for support. Mentor/mentee
pairs have taken to continuing the tradition over Slack after the workshop is
over. Many of our employees and mentees have taken versions of this practice to
the organizations they have subsequently joined.

At TDI, we borrow a page from Silicon Valley and use a “daily stand-up” to
provide students with an opportunity to talk about what they have learned and
where they have gotten stuck. Standups help unlock potential collaboration,
allow students to track progress (and maintain accountability), and provide a
venue to showcase wins in the arduous journey to data science mastery.


GROUND MENTORING IN ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES.

Make it clear why you’re encouraging mentoring and why it matters to the
organization. Are you providing space to talk about career goals, and/or to
practice and develop skills? Grounding the overall goals of the mentoring
program in your company’s values in virtual mentoring can help strengthen a
shared corporate culture even when employees don’t have a shared office.

At ANY, the workshops iterate between teaching career and leadership skills to
mentees and allowing time for the mentor and mentee to provide their individual
context and strengthen any important skills. We argue that a similar model can
work in companies, centered on teaching corporate values and contextualizing
them between the mentor and mentee. If your goal is community, ask the mentoring
pairs to think about how they can each build it and what role they tend to play
in their communities. If a value is innovation and creativity, ask your pairs to
redesign a process and learn from each other while doing so.


PROVIDE CONSISTENCY AND STRUCTURE.

Many mentoring programs spend a lot of time matching at the beginning and
evaluating at the end, without a clear structure on how to engage throughout the
mentoring relationship. In a virtual world, having a standing time for
mentorship is essential. (At ANY and TDI, we suggest weekly check-ins.)
Consistency builds trust. Showing up for each other builds trust. ANY gives our
pairs virtual modules, many of which are a video or article with a set of
discussion questions to facilitate conversation. Having a structured starting
place will often lead to interesting, specific, and relevant discussions.


COLLABORATE IN REAL TIME

Don’t just talk about goals; work on them together. Embrace the power of screen
sharing, which is great for visual learners and allows for collaboration. Resist
the instinct for mentors to always share, and put mentees in the driving seat —
mentors will see how mentees are performing, and may learn something as well.
Synchronous work tools such as Padlet and Google docs can help to increase
efficiency and satisfaction as pairs see their joint progress.


MENTORING WILL LEAD US FORWARD

In a time of incredible change, professional disruption, and overwhelming
loneliness, mentorship can anchor us. The connection and meaning it can bring
through rapport and clarity of purpose is critical to supporting people through
turmoil, and it can strengthen relationships across one’s organization. While it
is intuitive to most that mentorship will help new employees on the job, the
impact on those providing the mentoring is often overlooked. Successful
mentorship is much more about active listening than giving one-way advice, and
when approached from a place of reciprocity, there are substantial benefits to
mentors.

At ANY, we surveyed hundreds of professionals who worked with first-generation
college students through our mentoring and career development program. Over 90%
reported that their experience as a mentor helped them become a better leader or
manager at work. Indeed, developing skills to build rapport or purpose in
relationships is directly applicable to critical concepts such as situational
leadership, in which appropriate assessment of an employee and a specific
situation’s needs helps get results for all. For leaders who feel mentoring is
one more thing they can’t focus on right now, we encourage you to see this
powerful tool as something that can liberate you and empower your workforce to
support one another — and we hope you find purpose in doing so.

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Read more on Career coaching or related topics Developing employees, Leadership
development, Talent management and Mentoring
 * Marianna Tu is the CEO of America Needs You (ANY), a nonprofit that fights
   for economic mobility for first-generation college students. Her previous
   roles include New York Executive Director of Peer Health Exchange, a national
   health education nonprofit, and Associate Director at an international
   philanthropy consultancy. Marianna graduated cum laude from Harvard College
   and is also an Area Committee Member at the Harvard Center for Public
   Interest Careers (CPIC).
 * Michael Li is the founder and CEO of The Data Incubator, a data science
   training and placement firm, which was acquired by Pragmatic Institute, where
   he is president. A data scientist, he has worked at Google, Foursquare, and
   Andreessen Horowitz. He is a regular contributor to VentureBeat, The Next
   Web, and Harvard Business Review. He earned a master’s degree from Cambridge
   and a PhD from Princeton.

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Learn how to help your employees become the best they can be.
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