What Are the Steps to Grooming Successful Mentors?
January 5, 2008 at 6:45 am | In HR Issues | Leave a CommentQ: How do we start an employee mentoring program for our retail business?
- Teaching the Teachers, human resources, retailing, Waterloo, Iowa
A: First off, I’d like to acknowledge that managers need to play a role in driving employee engagement and performance. I would not recommend that you replace manager-employee coaching or try to make up for bad managers with a mentoring program.
1. Clarify your objectives.
An effective mentoring program supplements coaching from managers, and it should be positioned as a way to make the business, not just individual employees, more successful. From there you can add a more specific goal, such as helping new employees get up to speed quickly.
2. Define your mentor selection criteria.
Mentors need to be more than willing. They need to have a coaching attitude and ability. Describe these characteristics in writing – and other traits, such as particular business knowledge or specific skills.
3. Equip your mentors.
Provide tools and training to help mentors fulfill their role. This process goes beyond basic coaching skills to include an emphasis on:
a) Individualized partnerships: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” may serve people well most of the time, but it can actually get in the way of successful mentoring. Effective mentors understand their individual mentees’ needs and work with everyone differently. What works great for one person can derail another.
b) Career coaching. Although employees may look to their mentors for career “navigation” advice, our research indicates that few are clear on what’s important to them. Mentors need to help people get behind the core values that create job satisfaction for them. What do they like to do and why? What would enrich their work each day? Only then can mentors help employees create a plan for professional development, career progression or job enrichment.
4. Reinforce mentoring.
To reap the benefits that mentors provide, you need to make mentoring a way of life. Senior leaders must be role models and discuss with employees the impact that mentoring has on business and personal success.
Leaders experience success as mentors through practice. The more they mentor, the more successful their mentoring becomes. A virtuous cycle will then take hold: They believe in mentoring, they’ve seen how it works, and they’re motivated to build their own competence.
And don’t forget to build in accountability, metrics and recognition systems. Without these, mentoring can fall by the wayside as a “nice to do that we don’t have time to do,” instead of remaining a core strategy for building an engaged workforce and thriving business.
[Source: Cathy Earley, BlessingWhite, San Francisco, November 27, 2007.]
Best HR Practices for 2008
January 5, 2008 at 6:37 am | In HR Article | Leave a CommentSummary of Practices:
i. Safe, Healthy And Happy Workplace
ii. Open Book Management Style
iii. Performance Linked Bonuses
iv. 360-Degree Performance Management Feedback System
v. Fair Evaluation System For Employees
vi. Knowledge Sharing
vii. Highlight Performers
viii. Open House Discussions And Feedback Mechanisms
ix. Reward Ceremonies
x. Delight Employees With The Unexpected
1. Safe, Healthy and Happy Workplace: Creating a safe, healthy and happy workplace will ensure that your employees feel homely and stay with your organization for a very long time. Capture their pulse through employee surveys.
2. Open Book Management Style: Sharing information about contracts, sales, new clients, management objectives, company policies, employee personal data etc. ensures that the employees are as enthusiastic about the business as the management. Through this open book process you can gradually create a culture of participative management and ignite the creative endeavor of your work force.. It involves making people an interested party to your strategic decisions, thus aligning them to your business objectives. Be as open as you can. It helps in building trust & motivates employees. Employee self service portal, Manager on-line etc. are the tools available today to the management to practice this style.
3. Performance linked Bonuses: Paying out bonuses or having any kind of variable compensation plan can be both an incentive and a disillusionment, based on how it is administered and communicated. Bonus must be designed in such a way that people understand that there is no payout unless the company hits a certain level of profitability. Additional criteria could be the team’s success and the individual’s performance. Never pay out bonus without measuring performance, unless it is a statutory obligation.
4. 360 Degree Performance Management Feedback System: This system, which solicits feedback from seniors (including the boss), peers and subordinates has been increasingly embraced as the best of all available methods for collecting performance feedback. Gone are the days of working hard to impress only one person, now the opinions of all matter, especially if you are in a leadership role (at any level). Every person in the team is responsible for giving relevant, positive and constructive feedback. Such systems also help in identifying leaders for higher level positions in the organization. Senior managers could use this feed back for self development.
5. Fair Evaluation System for Employees : Develop an evaluation system that clearly links individual performance to corporate business goals and priorities. Each employee should have well defined reporting relationships. Self rating as a part of evaluation process empowers employees. Evaluation becomes fairer if it is based on the records of periodic counseling & achievements of the employee, tracked over the year. For higher objectivity, besides the immediate boss, each employee should be screened by the next higher level (often called a Reviewer). Cross – functional feed back, if obtained by the immediate boss from another manager (for whom this employee’s work is also important), will add to the fairness of the system. Relative ratings of all subordinates reporting to the same manager is another tool for fairness of evaluation. Normalisaion of evaluation is yet another dimension of improving fairness.
6. Knowledge Sharing: Adopt a systematic approach to ensure that knowledge management supports strategy. Store knowledge in databases to provide greater access to information posted either by the company or the employees on the knowledge portals of the company. When an employee returns after attending any competencies or skills development program, sharing essential knowledge with others could be made mandatory. Innovative ideas (implemented at the work place) are good to be posted on these knowledge sharing platforms. However, what to store & how to maintain a Knowledge base requires deep thinking to avoid clutter.
7. Highlight performers: Create profiles of top performers and make these visible though company intranet, display boards etc. It will encourage others to put in their best, thereby creating a competitive environment within the company. If a systems approach is followed to shortlist high performers, you can surely avoid disgruntlements.
8. Open house discussions and feedback mechanism: Ideas rule the world. Great organizations recognize, nurture and execute great ideas. Employees are the biggest source of ideas. The only thing that can stop great ideas flooding your organization is the lack of an appropriate mechanism to capture ideas. Open house discussions, employee-management meets, suggestion boxes and ideas capture tools such as Critical Incidents diaries are the building blocks that can help the Managers to identify & develop talent.
9. Reward Ceremonies: Merely recognizing talent does not work, you need to couple it with ceremonies where recognition is broadcast. Looking at the Dollar Check is often less significant than listening to the thunderous applause by colleagues in a public forum.
10. Delight Employees with the Unexpected: The last but not least way is to occasionally delight your employees with unexpected things that may come in the form of a reward, a gift or a well-done certificate. Reward not only the top performers but also a few others who are in need of motivation to exhibit their potential.
credit: Gireesh Sharma
Original artical : http://empxtrack.com/human-capital-management/articles/Human-Resources-Management-Practices-top-ten.html
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