Old-fashioned mentoring may be one of the most effective ways to improve job performance, but many mentorship programs don’t reach new hires who need guidance most, new research suggests.
Newly hired employees at a United States call center who received on-the-job advice from experienced employees outperformed non-mentored workers by 18 percent, and they also tended to stay with the company longer, according to a recent study by Harvard Business School professor Christopher T. Stanton and three other scholars. But when participation is optional, the people who could benefit most are often the least likely to seek it out, the researchers discovered.
The findings emerge as companies worldwide navigate the complexities of training and acclimating new employees in hybrid or remote work settings. With so much in flux, it might be tempting for companies to make mentoring voluntary, but companies would be better off making mentoring mandatory for all new workers since that would yield much higher productivity and performance gains, the researchers say.
"You have to make the program apply to everyone, not just those who volunteer."
“Peer-to-peer mentoring networks can have pretty profound implications,” says Stanton, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in HBS’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit. “But just setting up a mentoring program that assumes people will come is the wrong way to go. We found that people who need mentoring the most tend to opt out if given the chance. You have to make the program apply to everyone, not just those who volunteer.”
The researchers share their findings in the working paper Treatment and Selection Effects of Formal Workplace Mentorship Programs, coauthored by Stanton and Professors Jason Sandvik of Tulane University, Richard Saouma of the Eli Broad School of Business at Michigan State University, and Nathan Seegert, of the University of Utah.
Matching new employees with experienced workers
Previous studies show the importance of early on-the-job training and mentorship programs. In fact, nearly 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies reportedly provide mentoring opportunities to new employees.
Data on the effectiveness of these programs are thin, so Stanton and his colleagues sought to find out whether mentorship programs actually influence employee productivity and retention. The researchers worked with a company that operates a call center in which workers handle customer inquiries about purchasing new digital products and services, including phone, TV, and internet service.
Though the company already had a robust training program in place, the researchers made key alterations to mentorship programs for more than 600 new call center employees in 2019. They tested two different versions of the program.
"Some people just won’t admit they need help."
The first version created a “broad-mentoring” program in which some new employees were randomly provided mentoring while others were not. Other cohorts of new hires instead experienced a “selective-mentoring” version, in which new employees were given the opportunity to opt in or out of the mentoring program. Those who opted in were randomly subdivided into two subgroups—those who got a mentor and those who didn’t—while those who opted out didn’t get a mentor.
During the four-week mentoring program, new employees (or “protégés”) were randomly matched with experienced call center workers and attended a series of brief meetings to discuss their written responses to specific work-related questions and get feedback on other issues during their initial weeks on the sales floor.
The power of mentoring
The “broad-mentoring” tests showed that those who received formal mentoring generated at least 18 percent more revenue during their first two months on the sales floor, compared to those who didn’t receive formal mentoring. More than 90 percent of those early sales gains were sustained over the first six months on the job, though the researchers note that their revenue estimates became less precise with time.
Meanwhile, those who got formal mentoring were 11 percent more likely to stay at the company after one month, compared to those who didn’t receive mentoring.
"No matter what the cause, those who need help most are not seeking help."
The findings of the “selective-mentoring” tests showed no difference in productivity among those who opted in and got mentors and those who opted in but received no mentoring.
When the researchers compared the productivity of the latter against those who had opted out of mentoring, the result was clear: Those who opted in but received no mentoring still generated substantially more sales revenue than those who had opted out.
Why some new hires avoid mentors
After analyzing the test data and pre-hiring interview records, the authors found no correlation between any specific demographic or personality traits among those who opted in or out of mentoring. They did find that those who opted out of mentoring tended to have lower hiring scores based on pre-hiring interviews, but that still didn’t fully explain the wide productivity gap between opt-in and opt-out employees.
The findings suggest that “unobservable characteristics largely drive the decision to forgo mentoring,” meaning that hard-to-detect shyness, embarrassment, or even overconfidence in one’s abilities may lead many workers to avoid mentors, says Stanton.
“Some people just won’t admit they need help,” Stanton says. “There’s something like an intimidation factor at work. No matter what the cause, those who need help most are not seeking help.”
As a result, if companies selectively single out employees they think might need mentoring, they are likely to see, at best, only marginal productivity gains, while broad-based mentoring programs, with no opt-out provision, are likely to generate more impressive results, says Stanton. The companies that stand to benefit most stay flexible, refining their programs over time.
“The evidence shows that formal, broad-based mentoring programs work,” says Stanton, “even after you factor in the program costs.”
About the Author
Jay Fitzgerald is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: iStockphoto/PeopleImages]
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