Introducing Students to Change in an Unstructured Economy

1. Introducing Students to Change in an Unstructured Economy September 19, 2013 New Orleans

2. Participants Lorinda Nepaul – Chief People Officer, Match MG Fran McDonald – Director, HR, OLG Chantel Buscema – Intern, Graduate 2013 Pooya Faez – Intern, Candidate York MBA (2014) Dr. Mary E. Donohue – Founder, DMS & Adjunct Professor, Dalhousie School of Management

3. What We Will Cover • Introducing students to career development for both long-term and new employees who fear they may lose their jobs or don’t trust their employers. • ROI of the DMS • Match & trust • OLG & trust • A student’s view Help people. Feel good.

4. “Mentoring is a soft skill I don’t need.” – a senior manger INTRODUCTION Help people. Feel good.

5. Unstructured Economy • When students think of marketing, they often think of B2C rather than B2E, (business to employee). In the new knowledge economy, business will need to spend more time and effort on B2E, because of the changes and challenges that have become today’s new business environment. Help people. Feel good.

6. Unstructured Economy • How do you market drastic organizational change and opportunity to an audience who ostensibly understands the brand and its products inside and out; or to employees who have seen their company grow 100% in 12 months? • Use a structured and disciplined operating system. Help people. Feel good.

7. Idea in Brief • Mentoring, deployed through a positive feedback loop, increases performance and advances the career of an employee. • Mentoring provides an ROI of 79% when deployed through the DMS. • There are five performance/career benchmarks. Help people. Feel good.

8. Performance/Career Benchmarks • Performance • Commitment • Work Satisfaction • Trust • Value Help people. Feel good.

9. Instrument • The Donohue Mentoring System™ (DMS) is a peer engagement operating system that provides 16 weeks of curriculum to corporations using an e-platform. • Quantitative assessment is conducted with a series of 19 questions. The survey is deployed pre-program, mid-program and post. • Qualitative assessment is employed weekly in the form of 16 online questions to which participants are asked to respond. There are also four focus groups deployed in the form of conference calls. Help people. Feel good.

10. “Why would you use mentoring? Everybody does it.” – a student intern ROI OF DMS Help people. Feel good.

11. ROI of Mentoring • Mentoring with the DMS increases the ability of participants to communicate, problem solve and accept change. • In other words, the DMS helps retention and career development. Help people. Feel good.

12. ROI of Mentoring • Our preliminary findings indicate the DMS: • Reduces churn by 50% • Increases employee performance by 11% • Increases commitment to the company by 12% • Increases work satisfaction by 15% • Increases trust in leadership by 9% • Increases alignment with the goals of the organization by 31%. Help people. Feel good.

13. ROI of Mentoring • Increases a firm’s ability to retain and develop staff. • In most cases we see a 50% reduction in churn over the course of 16 weeks and lasting one year after the program ends. • 40% of mentees and mentors receive a promotion within one year of completing the program, if they are seeking it. Help people. Feel good.

14. ROI of Mentoring • Increases productivity • Work satisfaction increases 15% on average for mentees. According to Spreitzer and Porath “happy employees produce more than unhappy ones over the long term.” (HBR, Jan-Feb, 2012) • Employees who complete our program report that by week #4 they show up early for work, go above and beyond the call of duty, and attract people who are committed to work for the company. These are long-term employees. Help people. Feel good.

15. ROI of Mentoring • Increases Customer Satisfaction: Lyubomirsky, King and Deiner meta-analyzed 225 academic studies and confirmed that employees that are aligned with the organization’s goals are 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales and are 3x more creative than staff who aren’t aligned. (‘Positive Intelligence’ by Shawn Achor) Help people. Feel good.

16. Why students? WHO WERE YOUR STUDENTS? Help people. Feel good.

17. Students • In May, two students were introduced to this project: One student who had just graduated from a post-graduate degree program in communications, (Chantel), and one student currently finishing her MBA with a focus on consulting, (Pooya). Help people. Feel good.

18. The Students’ View • When asked what we should do about the challenges that were presented to us by a government agency and a private company, both students were prepared to draft a communication strategy for change. • But after the first meeting with each team the students realized the culture would not support edicts from above. Based on our experience, we helped them realize that change and growth communicated from the top down disengages employees, as Fullan reports and Black and Gregerson discuss. Help people. Feel good.

19. The Students’ View • Neither student had reckoned with the employees’ attachment or disengagement with the brand that the change in culture and desire to work this creates. Help people. Feel good.

20. Leadership Development OLG CASE STUDY Help people. Feel good.

21. OLG Challenge • Increase leadership capacity, and thereby the capacity of leaders to develop a change story for Ontario Lottery and Gaming – a government agency – while increasing retention of trust in team members who will be facilitating the change for the organization. Help people. Feel good.

22. OLG Challenge • There was resistance within the IT group, to change. Managers were unsure of how to create change stories that would be required to discuss the value and the impact on employees’ careers. Help people. Feel good.

23. OLG Challenge • At the first meeting with Pooya, many staff members felt that mentoring was too touchy feeling, and that it wouldn’t facilitate keeping key staff through modernization moved forward. • Mentees were sure modernization meant the end of their jobs. • Millennials within the organization felt negatively affected by modernization. Help people. Feel good.

24. OLG Challenge • To engage the mentees and to assist mentors (managers), OLG executives decided to beta test the mentoring program after trying it themselves. • After preliminary data was analyzed, it was determined that the curriculum should focus on building trust among employees and providing managers with tools to facilitate change. Help people. Feel good.

25. Preliminary Findings: OLG (start) Help people. Feel good.

26. Mid-Term Findings: OLG Help people. Feel good.

27. Focus Group – Con Call Findings • Conference calls that served as focus groups were held prior during weeks 4, 8 and 12 of the program. • Mentors – many who are 15 year veterans with the company – opened up about what they had learned and why they thought it was important to continue with structured and measured planning. Help people. Feel good.

28. Focus Group – Con Call findings • By week 12, many mentees were feeling like the program had opened up possibilities for them. Talia, a shy millennial, was one such person. Help people. Feel good.

29. Connecting with Millennials MATCH MG Help people. Feel good.

30. Match Challenge • Increase attraction and retention of young talent to a private firm that has grown 100% in less than 18 months, while suffering online persecution from millennial staff hired on a part-time basis. Help people. Feel good.

31. Match Challenge • Match was loosing key millennials as well as senior staff not vested by stock in the company, because of the continued growth-through-acquisition strategy. • Executives didn’t realize that the more they bought, or sold, the more their team that didn’t have stock didn’t trust them. Help people. Feel good.

32. Match Challenge • Another hiring challenge for Match occurred online. X - Employees were ranting online, on websites such as ratemyemployer.com and others. Help people. Feel good.

33. Match Challenge • Again, senior leadership was unprepared for the consequence of online negativity. • Young leaders were rejecting working at the company because of what they had read online. Help people. Feel good.

34. Match Challenge • Match decided that, rather than ignore what was being said online, they would create the Match Leadership Academy (MLA) to provide training and sponsorship opportunities within the company. • The MLA would use the mentoring program and sponsorship program designed by Dr. Donohue and her Team. Help people. Feel good.

35. Match Challenge • Prior to advertising further for employees or setting up the MLA, Dr. Donohue’s team, including Chantel, drafted and circulated a questionnaire to discover what millennials want in a workplace. Help people. Feel good.

36. Help people. Feel good.

37. Help people. Feel good.

38. What does management need to do to improve their overall effectiveness in recruiting young adults like yourself? What could companies do to increase your productivity at work? Help people. Feel good.

39. What actions can your future employer take to build a better workplace for young adults? Help people. Feel good.

40. The Findings Help people. Feel good.

41. Why did it work? THE SCIENCE BEHIND IT Help people. Feel good.

42. Academic Foundation • In a review of articles since 2006 when we started this project, we didn’t realize exactly what career development really was or how it affected trust, change, value and therefore engagement of employees. • The more we read and the more we reviewed the data, we realized that career development is a major factor in productivity, and retention of staff. Help people. Feel good.

43. Academic Foundation • Both students were well versed with academics, but neither had much experience with “real life.” • What the students ended up learning was that Drucker and Mayo were right and that Kotter, and Fullan are pretty interesting too. • For an unstructured economy look to unstructured time. Help people. Feel good.

44. Drucker • According to Peter Drucker, if employees are 100% engaged, feel 100% valued and trust their employer 100%, they will be reaching their maximum maximum potential at their work. This we believe is the focus of all HR departments to develop key staff members to their full potential. • Both students were part of initial meetings and survey that took place in June, 2013. Help people. Feel good.

45. Drucker • What the preliminary data and the focus groups demonstrated to the students and to the clients: there is a disparity between the scores of mentors and mentees, and this creates a career development gap. Help people. Feel good.

46. Drucker • For our clients, the data tells us that this career gap is caused by a lack of knowledge on the part of mentees about the company and their role within the company. • We also found out that less than 9% of employees trusted their direct boss and this caused a low desire to move forward in the company. • This was a revelation for senior leaders who thought their emails and their edicts were getting through and their pay would motivate staff. Help people. Feel good.

47. Mayo • Over the years, Dr. Mary has been investigating the “trickle down” effect as it applies to mentoring in the workplace. This theory might not work in the economy, but does it work in mentoring? The data show that it does. Help people. Feel good.

48. Mayo • In 1931-32, Elton Mayo, after experiments, later defined as the “Hawthorne Effect,” expressed the belief that workers perform better when they feel better in the situation because of the sympathy and interest of observers. Help people. Feel good.

49. Mayo • The data demonstrates that mentoring makes an employee feel differently. • The trickle-down effect of mentoring is that it enables employees to be more engaged and innovative, and this is because behavior is a function between people and the environment. Help people. Feel good.

50. So what did we learn? CONCLUSION Help people. Feel good.