Mentoring of employees forms an integral part of any organization. You cannot hope for your organization to make the most of their employees without orienting them to the company’s motto, visions and clarifying them about what is expected out of them during their tenure with the company. Plus, mentoring is also not just restricted to all the factors that we just mentioned. Mentoring is a process that helps employees to raise their concerns, if any, and also looks into their mental health. Therefore, the success of an organization also depends largely on how much it has been able to help their employees, and the kind of mentoring programmes they have in place. Speaking of mentoring programmes, we must understand that the techniques change over time, and it is vital that organizations learn to adjust their mentoring programme along with the requirements of the time.
Modern-day mentoring of employees is a key strategy to keep employees in the workforce and reap the most out of their services. We shall look into the types of modern mentoring and all the reasons why they are crucial in an organization’s growth and success.
Reverse Mentoring:
If you have been thinking that older and more experienced employees and professionals mentor young people and new hires, Reverse Mentoring is here to shatter that belief for you. Reverse mentoring is a process where older employees are mentored by younger employees on touch upon subjects of the new era, like social media marketing, recent trends and types of technology and several other things. It is very important for employees to understand and learn the usage of modern technology and techniques, and a lack of knowledge in these domains can lead to their careers taking a blow. In such a situation, younger employees can come into the picture and help the older employees grasp the concepts better. And the process also helps younger employees to stay dedicated to the company’s cause because they feel like their services are of utmost importance.
Micro Mentoring:
The second type of modern-day mentoring is Micro Mentoring, where the employees are put in touch with mentors over different time frames and in a more informal setting. Micro mentoring takes place one-to-one or sometimes in very small groups over social media and platforms like that. This makes the mentoring process easier than ever before because you get several types of mentoring options on several social media platforms. It is all at the disposal of your fingertips. You do not have to be at a certain place physically to be mentored. Plus, another biggest perk of micro mentoring is that it is not just confined for the mentoring of employees who have already come on board. It also provides expert guidance to the millennial looking for jobs on various social media platforms like LinkedIn and the like. They can seek counsel from professionals on these platforms and build contacts all the same. The micro mentoring programme helps them find jobs that are suitable for them and also helps them crack their way into it.
Group Mentoring:
The final type of mentoring that we endeavour to discuss in this article is that of Group Mentoring. As the name suggests, group mentoring happens in groups. But let that not fool you into believing that group mentoring targets mentees altogether without paying individual attention to their needs and learning process. Group mentoring is only structured in the form of groups, but they pay individual attention to the employees and help each of them grasp concepts and ideas that are being taught or discussed on a micro-level. The reason organizations opt for group mentoring is so that mentees have aligned goals and are in tandem with each other’s learning process. They pick up similar skill sets required for the organization’s purpose. It helps mentees connect with each other on different levels, educational as well as emotional. And this is what makes this form of mentoring quite a success. There are several other forms and models of mentoring (about which you can find here) that help in the company’s growth as well as the employees’ development. Group mentoring happens to be just one of those many.
Conclusion:
An organization might choose to implement one or all of the types of mentoring that we mentioned in this article. There is no one way to go about the mentoring process. An organization must gauge the characteristics of its employees to fashion ways of implementing the mentoring programmes. A successful implementation of a mentoring programme could result in miraculous productivity at work, whereas a half-baked and messy programme could cause a blow to the same. Therefore, an organization must identify the plan that works the best for it and work towards implementing the same successfully.