Junior Staff Are Struggling to Adjust to Flexible Schedules — Here’s Why.
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In today’s fast-paced business world, flexible work schedules have become increasingly popular, allowing employees to balance their professional and personal lives more effectively. However, with the rise of remote and hybrid work environments, one crucial aspect of employee development has taken a hit: mentoring. Recent findings by WFH Research, a group that includes Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom and other scholars, show that on-site employees devote more time to mentoring and professional development than their remote counterparts. Namely, those who came to the office devoted about 40 more minutes a week to mentoring others, nearly 25 more in formal training and about 15 additional minutes each week doing professional development and learning activities.
As a seasoned expert in helping leaders figure out a flexible return to office and hybrid work policy, I can attest that Bloom’s research is spot on. When you just let things take their natural course, junior staff suffer. No wonder leaders who previously showed strong support for flexibility like Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg changed their minds, at least about junior staff, pushing them to come to the office for three days a week — but also asking senior staff to come to the office to mentor recent hires.
Mentoring: The missing link in flexible work
Unfortunately, their proposed solution is wrong-headed. Mandating in-office attendance for most of the workweek is bound to lead to attrition, resistance, disengagement and lowered productivity. And it will not be very effective for mentoring, either. In the context of the return-to-office wars, senior staff especially resent coming to the office with the sole goal of mentoring junior staff by osmosis. They tend to go to their office or cubicle, shut their door and put on their headphones, and try to avoid interacting with anyone else. Junior staff is usually too intimidated by this obviously hostile and standoffish attitude and fails to get mentoring.
Instead, the solution is a structured mentoring program that embraces flexible schedules. Senior staff feels much less resentment about coming to the office once a week for several hours to do in-depth mentoring, along with some virtual mentoring sessions, compared to an obligation to come in three days a week for the weak soup of mentoring by osmosis.
Picture a garden with an abundance of diverse and colorful plants. Each plant represents an employee, and the garden as a whole represents your organization. The sun, water, and nutrients these plants receive are akin to the mentoring and professional development opportunities that nourish your employees. Without these essential resources, the garden withers and fails to reach its full potential. Similarly, without a structured mentoring program, your employees’ growth may be stunted, leading to a less vibrant and successful organization.
And it’s not only the gardening metaphor that illustrates effective mentoring: a study by Charter and Qualtrics of 3,005 desk-based workers in the United States does so as well. They found that “hybrid work does not limit the potential of mentoring” and “Successful mentoring relationships were similarly likely to occur if mentor and mentee met remotely [or in-person.”
Similarly, the Harvard Business Review reports that “many individuals incorrectly presume that physical proximity is essential in developmental relationships. But like work itself, mentoring is defined less by the medium in which it is accomplished than by the outcomes delivered.” If you have “commitment, trust, relationship quality, and mentor competence,” these “are the real ingredients of developmental growth,” and you can have these in both in-person and “virtual mentorship.”
But what is involved in a structured mentoring program of this sort?
Individual lunch sessions: Planting the seeds of trust
One-on-one in-person interactions with senior professionals serve as the sun in our garden analogy. These meetings foster personal bonding, vulnerability, psychological safety, and trust — the lifeblood of effective mentoring relationships.
While these sessions are powerful, senior professionals’ time is limited, and most want to minimize their time in the office. That’s why it’s essential to incorporate other mentoring activities.
Virtual coffee meetings: Nurturing connections across the distance
Imagine these virtual meetings as the water that sustains our garden. After trust has been established through in-person interactions, virtual coffee meetings with senior professionals offer a convenient and accessible way to maintain relationships.
The lower time burden and flexibility of these meetings make them an attractive option for busy senior professionals, no…
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