With the Great Resignation still fresh on their minds, several mentoring trends are starting to emerge that will speak to how employers respond to employee disengagement in 2023. These trends include:
There’s an inescapable buzzword that completely took over 2022’s social media and news headlines: “quiet quitting.” Even as the economy took a turn for the worse and a possible recession looms large, employee engagement trends that began in 2020 only accelerated. Workers are increasingly experiencing feeling discouraged by the wider market, leading to mental withdrawals from the hustle and grind.
At MentorcliQ, we believe mentoring can help solve many of the most pressing engagement and retention challenges employers are facing in today’s labor market. That includes how to properly uplift and re-engage employees who are facing increasingly difficult emotional challenges imparted by worldwide health, economic, and employment crises that feel relentless and unforgiving.
We live and breathe creating valuable and measurable mentee and mentor experiences. You can @ us on social media or drop us a line to chat about how mentoring can help invigorate, inspire, and retain in 2023.
Top 3 Mentoring Trends to Watch in 2023
Mentoring Trend #1: Employees will need significant re-engagement through mentoring
A Gallup study indicated that 50% of workers are mentally checked out and burned out. This phenomenon has many names. Call it the engagement recession. Call it quiet quitting.
As we head further into 2023, employers will need to focus on re-engagement strategies to help reverse this trend. Companies are now scrambling to figure out how exactly to do that. Consequently, we expect many organizations to lean into mentoring strategies to help workers who are feeling overwhelmed and beaten down by existential problems completely out of their control.
Mentoring Trend #2: Workers won’t re-engage without authentic connections
As organizations attempt to re-engage workers who have lost interest in the past year, we will see new and expanded strategies around making authentic connections. What that means will vary across organizations, but we’ll see the same DNA in every case: regular and purposeful human-to-human contact, even in remote work environments.
The 2022 global EY Belonging Barometer found 80% of workers report feeling lonely at work. This isn’t accidental or circumstantial. Our desire and pandemic-driven shift to remote flexibility is also causing a loneliness crisis as we lose connections to one another. Organizations that understand the dynamic between employee wants (remote flexibility) and employee needs (engagement and connection) will find mentoring strategies that prove effective for solving both issues.
Mentoring Trend #3: Organizations will re-examine and expand DEI-Centered spaces and DEI initiatives
Companies will find that re-engagement and authentic connections are often best accomplished through DEI-centered affinity spaces and more attention given to diversity, equity, and belonging. A stronger focus on no-strings-attached ERGs and other affinity spaces will create opportunities for re-engagement and authentic connections.
Employee experiences inside and outside of work and their overall level of engagement are directly related. The need for re-engagement and authentic connections means companies will continue to launch dedicated DEI spaces as a go-to and provable strategy.
We expect to see an explosion of DEI-centered affinity spaces in 2023 that help feed workers’ needs for no-strings-attached connections. These spaces, which alongside ERGs may include mentoring groups and mentoring circles that foster DEI and will allow workers to find human-to-human connections that are either scheduled regularly or even on demand.
Get Ahead of 2023 Mentoring Trends
Taking note of trends in employee engagement is important. Taking action, however, is far more important. Employees may stay put during tough economic times out of uncertainty. But a lack of engagement may sour them on your organization and push them to quit at the first, best opportunity.
Be the trendsetter. Learn more about why re-engagement, authentic connections, and DEI-centered spaces are all easily accomplished with mentoring software.
