Hybrid and Remote Mentoring to Integrate Junior Employees

Remote on-the-job training is tough. Here are some tips

Published: Thursday, August 25, 2022 - 12:03

Forward-looking organizations use hybrid and remote mentoring to solve two of the biggest challenges for that type of work: on-the-job training and integrating junior employees. Yet despite solving this major problem, mentoring programs that pair new staff with senior employees are all too rare.

Instead of using this best-practice methodology, many leaders simply complain about how hybrid and remote work undermine on-the-job training and employee integration, and try to force employees to return to the office. Senior leadership and management must adopt best practices for leading hybrid and remote teams to mentor employees in the future of work.

Remote mentoring to solve junior employee integration

To address the problem of integrating junior employees in remote and hybrid settings, an effective, structured mentoring program is needed where senior staff members are paired with junior staff members for virtual mentoring sessions.

Make sure to have one senior staff member from the junior colleague’s immediate team. The goal of the senior person within their own team is to help the person with on-the-job learning, understanding group dynamics, and professional growth.

Also include two from outside the team. One should be from the junior staff member’s business unit, and another one should be from a different unit. At least one should be located in a different geographical area.

These two mentors will be needed to overcome one of the key problems in company culture for remote/hybrid workers: the decrease in cross-functional connections across staff. Fortunately, during the epidemic, scholars discovered that connecting junior staff working remotely with different senior staff was a very effective way to extend the network of junior staff. Follow this research to help junior team members fit into the broader organizational culture while also facilitating cross-company intra-team collaboration.

Remote mentoring meetings

The senior staff member from the person’s own team should meet with their mentee monthly in a brief, 20- to 30-minute meeting, and go through a checklist. Below is a sample that you can adapt to your needs. Don’t feel obliged to go through all of them at one meeting; work on them over time:
• How did you (the mentee) do on the topics that we discussed last time?
• How confident do you feel right now in your ability to do your individual tasks, and what would make you feel more confident?
• What kind of questions do you have about your own individual tasks?
• What kind of obstacles do you see in doing your individual tasks effectively?
• What resources, information, or skills would you need to do your individual tasks better?
• How confident are you feeling right now about your role on the team, and what would make you more confident?
• How well do you feel you are collaborating with fellow team members?
• How well do you feel you are collaborating with the team leader?
• What kind of obstacles do you see in doing your collaborative tasks effectively?
• What resources, information, or skills would you need to do your collaborative tasks better?
• How confident are you feeling right now about your professional growth, and what would make you feel more confident?
• What kind of obstacles do you see to growing professionally?
• What resources, information, or skills would you need to improve your professional growth?

The goal of the senior people outside their team—whether in their business unit or outside their business unit—is to help the junior staff member address the lack of connections from outside their team and contribute to their professional growth. They should also meet monthly for 20–30 minutes and go through the following checklist, again adapting it to their needs:
• How did you do the topics that we discussed last time?
• How did the connections that I helped you make last month work out?
• What do you feel you did well, and what could improve the way you approach making such connections?
• What kind of obstacles do you see to making connections effectively?
• What kind of resources, information, or skills would you need to improve your ability to make such connections?
• How confident do you feel right now about how you make connections, and your current set of connections? What would make you more confident?
• What kind of connections would you want me to help you make this month?
• What would you like to know about how the company functions?
• How confident are you feeling right now about your professional growth, and what would make you feel more confident?
• What kind of obstacles do you see to growing professionally?
• What resources, information, or skills would you need to improve your professional growth?

Remote mentoring via virtual co-working

To facilitate on-the-job learning through virtual settings, mentors should work with each of their mentees for at least an hour every week. That involves the mentor and mentee signing on to a videoconference call and then each person working on their own tasks, but being able to ask questions if they have them. After all, much of on-the-job training comes from co-workers answering questions and showing less experienced staff what to do on individual tasks in the moment.

First, get on a videoconference call. Then, share what each plans to work on during this period. Next, turn microphones off but leave speakers on with video optional, and then each would work on their own tasks.

This experience replicates the benefit of a shared cubicle space, where a junior staff member works alongside senior staff but on their own work. As less experienced team members have questions, they can ask them and get them quickly answered. Most of the time, the answer will be sufficient. Sometimes, a more experienced team member will do screen-sharing to demonstrate how to do a task. Another option is to use a virtual whiteboard to demonstrate the task graphically.

Sometimes mentors and mentees will just share about themselves and chat about how things are going in work and life. That’s the benefit of a shared cubicle space; virtual co-working replicates that experience, helping to build bonds and integrate junior staff into company culture.

Conclusion

Many companies hired a substantial portion of their workforce during the pandemic. Cultivating and engaging junior employees and integrating them into the company culture requires effective on-the-job training and building bonds with existing staff. Traditional office-centric methods to do this fare poorly in hybrid and remote settings. By contrast, a structured, remote-mentoring program offers an excellent solution to these problems and constitutes a critical component of hybrid and remote work best practices.

About The Author

Gleb Tsipursky

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky helps quality professionals make the wisest decisions on the future of work as the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. A proud Ukrainian American, he is the best-selling author of seven books, including Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. His cutting-edge thought leadership has been featured in more than 650 articles in prominent publications such as Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and USA Today. His expertise comes from more than 20 years of consulting for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox and more than 15 years in academia as a cognitive scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Ohio State. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter@gleb_tsipursky, Instagram@dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his Wise Decision Maker Course.