What Great Mentorship Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace

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.

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.

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