You can invest in your people, keeping their skills up-to-date for the constant change they will be faced with in the workplace, or you can view all of them as a simple cost to be cut down to the bare minimum.
If you do, at least consider the cost of hiring a bunch of new folks year after year.
Because you will be.
In other words, it’s successful when the organization puts together and supports an intentional mentorship program. When they don’t they become reliant on chance interactions in the office. That’s the difference. It’s not that hybrid and remote employees just can’t be trained and mentored. It’s that quality mentoring requires intention.
If you want to provide quality mentorship for your junior employees create and support a program to do that. Period. End of discussion. Where they are located is not relevant.
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had about this over the years. Trust me, there have been a lot. I’ve watched some really brilliant people who do great work and are highly knowledgeable have terrible experiences trying to train others because they were not adept at the skills necessary to run a training class. A great many people have, through no fault of their own, not learned how to facilitate, the finer points of public speaking, or how to read students’ body language.
To be a great trainer you need to learn those things.
My point isn’t to toot my own horn. It’s to give you a concrete example of what a difference sitting and talking to your employees can make in terms of understanding what works for them, or doesn’t work for them in the workplace. A survey has a purpose, especially when you realize that meeting one on one with all of your employees doesn’t scale very far. If you really want to know what’s going on, though, don’t wait for someone to leave so you conduct an exit interview. A stay interview might prevent them from leaving in the first place.
And for god’s sake, conduct exit interviews too, and be willing to act on them. These people are telling you what went wrong, why wouldn’t you want to know that?
It is in your best interest to have employees who are growing and advancing in their careers. One is because they continue to become more valuable to the organization, which you need. Secondly, as they grow and become more valuable they are also more likely to stay. Turnover is costly. The organization can provide mentors and other resources that would be more difficult to do on their own. In return, they get employees who grow with the organization. Who wouldn’t want that?
Personally, I wouldn’t use the term lazy. I don’t think they are just being lazy, I think parents and managers default to this approach because they don’t know any better. They haven’t been given clear direction on how to parent or manage, and they’ve been overwhelmed with the variety and often conflicting information they can get. Without clarity, they’ve defaulted to the simplest solution – do it yourself.
For managers, that looks a lot like Jake describes it. Fixing the work of your reports instead of providing feedback, reminding them repeatedly about deadlines, needing to see them in the office working, being CC’d on every email, and generally just looking over their shoulder at every turn. I don’t know many managers who want to work that way, yet we all know there are plenty of managers who do. As I said earlier, I don’t think they want to be lazy, I think they lack the proper training and clarity about managing. How much better could they be, and in turn the people who report to them be, if our organizations provided that?