Frederike Hennig Discusses Study on Motivation as Important to the Design of Virtual Mentoring Programs
The Chronicle is delighted to highlight a recent study by 3rd year graduate student Fredericke Hennig and her team at Freie Universität Berlin.
Hennig, F., Wesche, J. S., Handke, L., & Kerschreiter, R. (2024). Designing virtual mentoring programs based on students’ motivation to participate: A qualitative study. Information and Learning Science.
Ramya Ramadurai (RR): Could you share what initially drew your team to studying motivations related to Virtual Mentoring Programs?
Frederike Hennig (FH): In general, we were interested in taking a closer look at virtual mentoring as an emerging, alternative format to face-to-face mentoring. Virtual mentoring has become increasingly popular in recent years – and the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this development, particularly in educational contexts. As this switch to virtual formats was often prompted by pure necessity in times of contact restrictions, cancellation of public events etc., we asked ourselves whether virtual mentoring would be able to persist in post-pandemic times, where people would be able to interact face-to-face again. We quickly realized that the key to answering this question lies with the target group of such programs: the mentors and mentees. Accordingly, we wanted to understand whether virtual mentoring is (still) an attractive offer to mentors and mentees. Prior research has shown that examining motivation offers fruitful insights into why people engage in mentoring and we were interested in finding out whether these findings would also hold true in virtual settings.
Though, these studies mainly focused on the motivations of mentors participating in face-to-face mentoring. In our study, we were curious about whether this motivation would differ when relating to virtual mentoring, as it is critically different from face-to-face formats (for example, regarding the mode of contact between mentor and mentee, the mentoring activities, the ways program staff supports the mentoring relationships).
RR: Your study identifies a significant tension between the flexibility that virtual mentoring offers and the potential challenges it poses for relationship-building. What strategies would you recommend for designing VMPs that effectively balance these aspects to foster meaningful mentor-mentee connections?
FH: One of the greatest assets of virtual mentoring programs is flexibility, which allows mentors and mentees to adapt the mentoring relationship to their individual needs (e.g., to organize the mentoring according to one’s own time schedule). At the same time, too much individual flexibility can compromise mentors’ and mentees’ focus on their mutual relationship.
To avoid this problem, there are several strategies that virtual mentoring programs can employ across different phases of the mentoring process in order to create an optimal environment for relationship building:
- Attracting and selecting the right people (especially potential mentors) by
- Creating program advertisements that target individuals’ altruistic motivation to help a less experienced person (for mentors) and promote the opportunity of receiving career-related support (for mentees) – as we identified these as strong motivators for potential mentors and mentees in our study.
- Managing expectations by clearly communicating what it means to be a mentor/mentee and underlining the particular challenges of virtual mentoring (e.g. slower relationship building). Importantly, it should be underlined that mentoring is a social relationship that thrives through the provision of psychosocial support and role modeling – also, and especially, in the virtual environment.
- Providing adequate training to prepare mentors for their role, particularly in terms of relationship building. Accordingly, training should equip mentors with guidelines and/or “toolboxes” on how to effectively use different ICT functionalities to manage relationships online, for example how to start a conversation online or how to use collaboration software to create fun activities online.
- Matching suitable mentoring pairs. This can be achieved through a carefully designed process of gathering mentoring relevant information and matching mentor and mentee according to that information. As our study shows, potential mentors and mentees wish to name specific preferences about the other (e.g., concerning personal background or professional experiences) and also want to be actively involved in the matching process.
- Closely supervising mentoring pairs during the mentoring process (ideally through trained coaches working/volunteering for the mentoring program/organization). In this way, problems can be identified at an early stage and solutions can be sought. Also, supervisors get a grasp of where flexibility is required and where participants need guidance. This is also reflected in our study findings, as potential mentors and mentees on the one hand call for concrete structures (e.g. clear objectives of the program), but on the other hand also want to profit from flexibility (e.g. individual meeting schedules).
RR: How does your team envision these insights should be utilized by those designing and implementing mentoring programs?
FH: As our practical recommendations are aligned with the subsequent steps to plan and implement a mentoring program, they can be used as a guideline in the process of planning and implementation. Most importantly, program designers should be aware of the challenges that virtual mentoring poses to relationship building and the extra efforts that are required to implement effective virtual mentoring.
