Changes in Mentorships -obejctives and proposal on how to reach them

Reps
#1

Changes in Mentorships

Hello Amazing reps,

As this is a very long post here is a tl_dr if you are in a hurry

After understanding the challenges we have defined our objectives and how we want to reach those. We now need your feedback on this! Our objectives are: 1) mentors have clear roles, 2) support each mentee as needed, 3) and help communicate updates in the reps program. 4) New mentors are onboarded regularly and 5) mentees know that they can reach out to their mentors.

In order to reach those objectives, we propose the following steps: 1) clarify mentors activities and 2) the role of mentors, 3) improve communications between the mentors and the council, and 4) establish a member (or members) of the council as the point of contact for mentorship administration (including onboarding). To make sure that mentees are able to receive help when they need it, we 5) address the problem of inactive mentors by making sure that both overwhelmed mentors and mentees whose mentor is inactive can reach out to the council.

For the full explanation read on!

After gathering, through a survey and meetings, your opinions and feedback on the challenges of Reps mentorship we now have a broad proposal on how we would like to revamp Reps mentorship. This proposal includes our objectives for reps mentorship, and some suggestions on how these objectives can be reached.

This proposal was reviewed and discussed by the council, while we also collected feedback from the mentors during two mentors calls. Thanks to this work we now have an overall plan, and we would like to hear your opinions and observations, so that we can further improve on it. Please leave your comments below.

After analyzing your feedback, we will go ahead and elaborate concrete steps to be implemented next year.

Challenges

The fact that the 1) role of a mentor is not clear anymore emerged as one of the most important challenges. This is probably due to changes in the role of a mentor doing the years, which led to the fact that their role is now not so clearly defined anymore.

Furthermore, 2) some mentors are not active or have too many mentees. This might be connected to the fact that 3) few new mentors are onboarded each year.

Communications problems also emerged. Sometimes 4) there is a communication breakdown between mentors and mentees. There are also 5) general difficulties in communications within the Reps Program. While the last point is not an issue of mentorship, we believe that mentors have an important role in helping the program front it.

Objectives:

These objectives can be considered as an “ideal future state” of mentorship.

  • Mentors clearly know their role and functions

  • Mentees can reach out to their mentor when they need to

  • Mentors support each mentee with a frequency that is appropriate to their needs

  • New mentors are onboarded regularly

  • Mentors are well-informed about updates in the Reps Program and can communicate them to their mentees

Suggestion on how to reach these objectives

  1. Clarify the role of Reps Mentors
  • We would like to re-define the Mentor role as one of support, offering advice and encouragement, helping Reps to stay active and finding the way in the program/mozilla, but not policing their activities.
  1. Define mentors activities

  • Supporting new Reps. This is a role in which mentors are doing an excellent job, but we will try to understand if more support is needed.

  • We would like mentors to have a general idea of how their mentees are doing and offer support as appropriate:

    • We suggest that the mentor aim to organize at least one meeting a year with each mentee to touch base with them. This meeting could be used to discuss the plans of the mentee and also to establish what kind of support they need

  • We would like mentors to help to communicate important changes in the Reps Program. We noticed that not all news we communicate reach all reps, and mentors could have an important role to help the council make sure that all reps are up-to-date with what is happening in the program.

  1. Improve communication between Council and mentors, through
  • Regular communications
  • Organization of mentors call
  1. The council should clarify responsibilities regarding mentorship administration
  • Specific members of the Reps Council will be the point of contact to communicate information and onboarding new mentors
  1. To address the problem of inactive mentors we would like to:

  • Encourage mentors to let the Council know if they are overwhelmed

  • Re-assign mentees to new mentors

  • Encourage mentees whose mentor is inactive to reach out to the council

Please let me know if you have any feedback!

Bests,

Francesca

6 Likes
Reps weekly call 07-01-2021
Reps Council activity report 2020 - March 2021
#2

Hi Francesca

I think that these plans look good. Mentors are important and are a key part of the ReMo team and I think that the redefinition of Reps into a ReMo community support role is a good idea as it will help Mentors be closer to the community without the effort of the “policing” activity role.

#3

Sounds like a lot of work to implement and nothing different from other statements made on previous MOZ gatherings, meetings and events, looks nice on the paper as usual. How will it be different this time?

We Reps lack a lot of real support and decision power all over the world, communication channels continue to be vague, and several mentees have been abandoned for years now…

The point is, can we put this burden on Mentor’s shoulders and expect things to start moving nicely as years ago? What things have changed for bad that have drawn communities back or totally wiped them off the map in many cases? Mentors are not to be totally blamed here.

If a change is expected lets look at the root of the problem which is lots of stalled communities all over the globe with very little support, etc.

1 Like
#4

I agree totally with you.

I think that the first steps is to improve the communication between Reps and mentors and Mentors with council that since a lot of years is missing or not very good (based on the period).

In this way we can see the people active and also what are the real issues or needs.
Without communications it is impossible to do anything.

#5

Thank you all for commenting on this post.

Communication will be definitely be important for this proposal to be effective, that is why we are aiming to improve communication between the council and the mentors.

We are also trying to make sure that mentors can reach out to the council if they are feeling overwhelmed, to make sure that no one is taking on more than they can do.

I have added a few proposals, but If you have any ideas on how we can improve communications, or better support mentors, please reach out and let me know :smile:.

We will try to take this plan step by step, and to check back with the mentors and all reps to see if it is working.

#6

I think that the first thing is that the council starts doing again the publishing in the reps council note tags as the reps program doesn’t know what is doing the program itself and it is very bad.

#7

Francesca,
I think this plan looks great! I’m interested to see the concrete steps for implementing the plan which will give some more opportunity for feedback.

My 2¢ on the post - Communication and accountability are going to be key going forward.

  1. I think the minimum for mentors meeting each mentee should be at least once in 6 months rather than a year. Once in a year seems too low of an expectation.
  2. I believe surveying the Reps about their mentors once a year or so would help a lot in understanding what the Reps are feeling about their roles & mentors. It would also prevent the role definitions from “blurring” and we would be able to detect and keep these problems in check.
  3. Surveying the mentors once a year or so to understand how they are feeling about mentoring load & their role.
  4. Lastly, I also think that Reps mentors meeting with all their mentees at once shortly after the mentors call. This would keep the Reps informed and up to date with the information the council is feeding mentors and would also tackle the information sharing problem via Reps call because not many Reps join that.

Thanks,
Sid

1 Like
#8

I think that this is a really good idea.

#9

Hi, thank you very much for the feedback!

We thought that once a year would be enough, because there are some people that have been reps for a very long time, and do not need much support. However, the idea was that during that one meeting mentors and mentees would discuss how much help the mentee need and, for example, establish that a meeting every three months would be useful. We definitely expect that most mentees would receive support more than once a year :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for all the other suggestions! We are trying to set up some concrete steps, and we will definitely take these into consideration :smile:

1 Like
#10

Hi Daniele,

Thank you for the feedback. I think this is more of a general issue that having to do with mentorship. But it is something that you could propose to the council.

#11

Maybe we could create a system where mentees can reach a group of mentors. This would do away with the need to balance the mentees-to-mentors ratio and allow the group of mentors to respond instead of relying on individuals.

#12

please give my the names of reps who are abandoned for years so i can add them to list for reassignment.
Thanks

Tim maks

#13

This is an interesting idea. I think at the moment could be a bit difficult to implement, but maybe it is something that we could keep in consideration for implementing it later on, at least for those mentees that need less support…