Reverse Mentoring in HR

Digital transformation has forced companies to implement new technologies that older employees may not be familiar with.

Reverse mentoring is one of the great business trends of the immediate future. This figure consists of the fact that, contrary to what is usual, it is the youngest employees who guide and guide the oldest in certain disciplines, such as those related to technology or social networks.

What is Reverse Mentoring?

Reverse mentoring or reverse mentoring is a technique for exchanging skills between junior and senior professionals, through which younger employees train veteran managers in subjects such as new technologies, social networks or the latest work trends. But the key to the success of reverse mentoring is that beyond knowing how Twitter or the latest mobile phone model works, the company's executive can understand the behavior and way of acting and thinking of so-called digital natives. That is his great virtue.

The “paternity” of reverse mentoring is attributed to Jack Welch. In 1999, when he was CEO of General Electric, Welch had 500 of the company's top executives learn how to use the Internet with the help of younger, lower-ranking employees. Since then, more and more companies have used this learning formula as a regular part of their daily lives. The fact is that the benefits are multiple and varied.

Advantages of Reverse Mentoring

In addition to being a good way to integrate employees of different ages, Reverse Mentoring can completely transform a company at different levels. In fact, we can classify the advantages obtained from this tool into four groups:

Sharing digital knowledge

The great advantage is at the same time the most obvious. Through this training program, senior profiles open their professional horizons to new dimensions where digital plays a major role. Thanks to the help of digitally native employees, the entire company will gain a more up-to-date and modern image through the good use of social networks.

Diversity

The program is an excellent opportunity not only to share knowledge, but also to share values. The more open and informed vision that young people have about diversity issues represents a great opportunity to integrate these values into our company.

Retaining Millennial Talent

In recent years, traditional companies, such as those in the financial sector, have discovered that they have serious problems retaining millennial and z talent in their companies. Through this generational exchange, new generations develop new ties with the organization, thus being less likely to abandon our project in the short term.

Changes in business culture

The integration of younger people among managers of large companies through these generational diversity programs is a good opportunity to get to know millennials and their interests.

Taking as a reference the values of a new generation allows traditional companies to evolve and create an organizational culture that shares philosophy with the youngest.

Symbiotic knowledge exchange

Although at first, reverse mentoring is conceived as training provided by the youngest for the rest of the employees, the reality is that senior profiles are also transformed into an immeasurable source of knowledge for juniors.

The extensive professional experience of the oldest provides a mature and realistic point of view that new generations can incorporate into their own vision of the future.

Implement a Reverse Mentoring Program in 4 steps:

1. Define the objectives

It is important that the general objectives that we have as a company are standardized and have a link with the objective of reverse mentoring. For example, if as an area of Marketing one of the objectives is to grow community and engagement on social networks, those employees with junior positions, who are generally experts in managing social networks for a generational reason, can share this knowledge with those senior positions that have empirically learned to participate in this digital world.

2. Create and establish a work plan

Once you have established the objective of the program, it is important to include the following details so that once the program is over you can measure its effectiveness and the impact it had on the organization:

➡️ Participants: those collaborators who are willing to teach and those who are willing to learn without any barriers.

➡️ Groups: it must be borne in mind that these trainings are aimed at breaking the generational gap and achieving a better work environment, so we must understand those who have the same interests, and can be more related to certain topics and thus create groups.

➡️ Times: these should be easy to digest training sessions that do not exceed 30 minutes in order for us to motivate the participation of both parties.

3. Pairing

Special emphasis must be placed on this point, as it may be the trigger for our program not being successful, since, as mentioned above, it is of the utmost importance that when pairing mentors and apprentices, we seek a relationship between them in terms of interests and tastes. You can rely on some software where you record information about each of the participants and through an algorithm you can find your groups.

4. Continuous monitoring of training

Once the program is underway, it is important to continuously monitor the mentorships to know the impact they are having, from asking how the people who are participating feel, to measuring the objectives that were set at the beginning of the program.

The implementation of a reverse mentoring strategy has a positive impact both on the person receiving the training and on the mentor. Other advantages of this strategy are: the creation of a culture of open communication, a feeling of importance among the members of a team and the promotion of an optimal environment of companionship.

‍

Ready to try it? 🚀