Mentorship is a hot topic for businesses in the rising age of AI. As work skills need reshuffling and businesses move towards establishing market presence through multi-vertical development, the need for developing strong in-house talent is greater than ever.
Everyone from entry-level staffers to CEOs can use AI to augment their work but this is only 6the tip of the iceberg. Companies are now exploring AI-driven mentorship both as an active platform for business learning as well as a means of AI-driven learning. Of the two, the latter is still in its early stages but gaining ground fast. First, the market is rapidly evolving with many businesses opting for mentorship programs to make good on their growth potential and market ambitions.
Moreover, a lot of executives, as this Forbes article mentions, are turning to AI mentorship to accelerate their careers or find balance. However, the majority of mid-to-entry-level professionals still need human mentorship to actualize their skills. This is where mentorship platforms like LEAD that combine employee engagement with the power of AI-driven insights are pathbreaking to a greater business verge.
Here are 5 insights that will help you understand how to leverage mentorship platforms the right way for accelerated employee career development and business growth:
Feeling TLDR? How about a quick video that sums up the best bits? Yes, we got you! 🙂
5 Mentorship Insights for Optimizing AI-driven Peer Learning
Breaking Down Siloed Learning
One of the biggest problems with businesses at the mid-cap level is their inability to push past the growth curve. As growth dries up they look to cut corners when they should really be looking to expand their portfolio of products or services. This is only possible when they develop an incremental mentorship program based on growth prospects and emergent market opportunities. According to this recent McKinsey blog –
While there are also well-established benefits to encouraging individuals to take risks, just 28 percent of respondents say top management at their organizations encourages high-potential, risky projects. Respondents who say that their management does support employees in taking on these efforts are also more likely than others to report outperformance, both on revenue growth and return on capital.
The reason why most companies do not want to risk potentially highly rewarding projects that may clear a growth bottleneck is they lack expertise. When companies continually invest in mentorship and growth opportunities, they retain their best talent for years on end. Further, all the talent they attract in the market also fuels their growth ambitions aggressively.
DEI-based Mentorship
DEI activities are often very expensive, time-consuming, and not very effective. There has recently been a shift away from DEI programs in corroborates since many leaders find them lacking in turnover and positive outcomes. However, most of them recognize that DEI growth is important and will provide longer-term benefits to their companies. This is where mentorship programs with a focus on DEI come in to produce greater result-oriented outcomes. Consider this quote from this article on Forbes –
For many people, finding a mentor informally is hard. However, it can be especially difficult for employees from diverse backgrounds. Women and minorities greatly benefit from formal programs to find mentors, whereas it’s easier for white males to find them informally.
What mentorship offers here is something quite unique in the DEI space. They can utilize AI-driven skill development and application while enabling mentors and mentees to generate strong rapport that breaks down silos. Consider this scenario – a company runs a DEI program to orient recruits from new sites in new markets to orient and work with the company’s headquarters. They are able to liaise with mentors from headquarters off-site while driving most of their mentorship work via the AI-driven program. This helps in rapid orientation, skill uptake, and evaluation of performance margins all of which help mentees get better and graduate to emerging roles more effectively.
Creating Dynamic Mentorships
Traditional business mentorship programs are a dated entity in the business domain now. Since the market is highly dynamic, the need of the hour is to create dynamic mentorship that enables professionals to create hands-on working skills. The best way to do this at the enterprise level is by using mentorship platforms with AI-enabled support. Using the programs on the platform, employees can pace their own mentorship with inputs from mentors when needed. In certain cases, this may even become streamlined if mentorships are conducted virtually through recorded media. Of course, this is not the best substitute for face-to-face mentoring but it does offer more dynamism to broad mentorship programs.
The reason why this works is simple. Creating dynamic mentorships requires using AI tech to foster growth across all hierarchy levels of an organization. Moreover, identifying and opting for growth programs is a difficult task most employees may not want to take up. Usually, the HR has to work with them to grow their employee profile and project toward career growth options. But using AI suggestions and mentoring options, employees can create their own career growth plans which can then grow as they acquire and apply skills. One of the most common ways this is manifesting is from ‘quiet hiring’ as mentioned in this CEO Magazine article. It mentions how utilizing incentivized employee engagement and mentoring allows companies to turn quiet quitters into motivated performers.
Continuous Mentorship Programs
Ongoing mentorship is one of the strongest motivators for professionals to join and continue with the company. Using AI-driven mentorship platforms enables businesses to conduct peer learning as an employee engagement activity. Some apps like LEAD.bot also offer virtual coffee chats to build strong networking ties within companies. When individuals from different departments come together new ways to grow the company open up and employees learn diverse skills. This is highly useful when companies are exploring adjacencies within their market space and developing their in-house talent.
Continuous mentorship programs also align greatly with a growing trend in the global education space. Nowadays, getting dual degrees is becoming the norm in the US education market. Experts say a single-degree education is not good enough to secure a job in the market over time. That is why, companies using continuous mentorship programs enable graduates with multidisciplinary learning and create high-powered career growth paths. Moreover, continuous mentorship helps companies understand where their talent bulk lies and how to best leverage it as it grows. With companies needing to vie for more quality and personalization in both the B2B and B2C market, creating job spaces across the company that cater to growing needs like Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer can help business activate their latent business skill.
Anticipatory Mentorship & Development
Continuous mentorship is an early-stage form of anticipatory mentorship particularly when using AI-powered insights to understand employee growth patterns. Anticipatory mentorship looks at the same image from the top-down perspective. As the granular data from AI mentorship ranging from type, category, and level appears, HR experts can create the right umbrella for covering their needs and liaise with execs to align them effectively. This enables people to further develop their skills based on the insights they get and the supervisory mentoring they avail from their mentors. This is one of the best ways to use AI-driven programs like LEAD that offer mentorship management options across many verticals.
How Should Your Company Approach Mentorship Platforms with AI support?
AI is a powerful tool for doing a lot of things including enabling workers to learn faster and actualize their career growth potential. This not only grows brand loyalty and fosters greater business performance at the macro level but also sends signals across the industry to your company’s commitment to employee development. That is why many businesses are investing in AI platforms like LEAD.bot that foster employee engagement and mentorship.
LEAD.bot is a team engagement platform available on Slack and Teams. It is an all-in-one team development software with features like virtual coffee chats, buddy programs, birthday celebrations & work anniversary celebrations, new hire onboarding programs, and Pulse Surveys.
LEAD.bot also offers cutting-edge Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) for big enterprises and institutions. Eecutive to mid-level managers use ONA to gain highly actionable insights and build strong workplace connections. Using this app enables developing innovative employee engagement ideas to connect employees and foster better organizational health, employee retention, and overall performance with this simple app!
LEAD.bot is a product of LEAD.app and we also LEAD.bot’s sister app Sunrize which showcases workplace attendance by graphs right on Slack! Book a demo now
