Covered by: HR Daily Advisor
Among the attendees at the conference was Prositions, a software and technology company based out of Iowa that specializes in products for talent acquisition, development, retention, and transition. One of the products they brought to the forefront this year was MentorString™, a virtual mentoring and social collaboration platform.
Prositions says that MentorString was created to address a very specific and high-priority challenge—human capital shortage. While over 60% of companies cite “leadership gaps” as a top business challenge, a mere 13% rate themselves as “excellent” in providing leadership training programs. With a majority of companies not prepared to develop their next generation of employees, MentorString is meant to fill this gap as a new internal collaboration tool to rival historically superior external tools such as Facebook and Linkedin.
Democratized Coaching
In a model Prositions refers to as “democratized coaching,” MentorString allows all employees within a company to build mentoring relationships and collaborative connections regardless of tenure or level of responsibility. Not only does this model improve communication at all levels and facilitate faster onboarding, but it’s also a great way to keep everyone engaged—freshly recruited talent can count on receiving wisdom from longtime members of the company, and upper level managers can collaborate with high-potential newcomers.
All of these connections are laid out for each individual via the most unique feature of MentorString, the String Diagram. The diagram’s visual map of the user’s connections can be sorted by a variety of filters, showing how groups, mentors, and peers are coming together in the organization’s virtual collaborative environment. Prositions says the product is ideal for companies ranging in size from a few hundred employees up to 100,000 or more.
Mentorship is important—but so is compliance. If you’re a California employer who provides mandatory harassment prevention training to supervisors under AB 1825, you are now also required to provide abusive conduct prevention training under AB 2053, which was passed on September 9, 2014 and takes effect on January 1, 2015. But not to worry—the definitive best practices report is here!
