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.
John Tropea says:
Jul 8th, 2008
Great post, I posted about this here http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/LibraryClips/~3/310916525/
“In the break a baby boomer mentioned that the netgen knew how to work in a socially productive way but they don’t really know anything yet, so there is a real need for them to connect with the baby boomers, like mentoring.
- I mentioned that mentoring doesn’t have to stop when you are not in the same physical space
- social tools can be used for perpetual mentoring”
I like the 2 in 1 approach, bringing these parties together achieves mutual benefit (it fills a gap each has)…and not only that, but part of our job (social software coordinators) is being done for use by the workers (promoting and adoption of new tools).
But it does more, as it’s informal learning (learning as part of working), it’s learning off each other in a casual way in what time and format suits you (rather than a trainer at a specific time to an audience)
At the same time it’s a relationship technique (connecting people)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CollaborativeThinking/~3/329222160/social-networki.html
- from these stats we can use counter isolation techniques to retain talent…people want to be connected, especially the netgen who have grown up in a connected world…otherwise they won’t feel fulfilled and move on