Mutual Mentoring is Essential to Enterprise 2.0 ROI

Pete Fields of Wachovia recently discussed his firm’s Enterprise 2.0 adoption efforts with Paul McDougall of InformationWeek.

The company is growing use of wikis, blogs, social networking, and instant messaging, but it’s also making use of its most valuable long term asset – it’s people. The company is working to retain younger workers by directly soliciting their input on these new technologies, and pairing them with senior staffers in a unique twist on mentoring:

Fields said that many of corporate America’s young workers’ engagement levels “fall off the table” after about a year on the job because “we give them no means of input.”

To change that, Wachovia is giving its Gen Y workers a role in helping its Enterprise 2.0 makeover succeed. Younger employees are assigned to teach senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks.

This is a very smart approach not only for adoption of the new technology tools, but for business experience and know-how as well. Between the two workers one has the technology knowledge, one has the business experience, and both are needed to be successful.

We often talk about how the millennial generation has an advanced grasp of these social and collaborative tools, but just half of the story in my opinion. I see enterprise 2.0 tools not as the exclusive domain of youth, but as a better connector for multiple generations, so that wisdom, tacit knowledge, and business know-how from the experienced can be shared with younger workers.

In return, those younger workers can show their more experienced colleagues how to better organize information with tagging and folksonomy, streamline collaboration using wikis, build online social networks and use them to discover the right people to work with on projects, involve them throughout the process to get a high quality, refined final product, and inform broader communities in a conversational context using blogs.

To make this vision a reality, we have to draw in as many people as possible from all generations, industries, locations, and levels of experience.