MENTORING: The best way forward

In celebration of the National Friendship Day this past weekend,  We posed some questions to our colleagues and the responses were remarkable leading us into an in-depth conversation. This is a summary of our findings.

When is a friendship established?

Can Friendship exist in a workplace?

How does friendship at work enhance your productivity?

At UBA, we have always identified ourselves as a family and steadily taken on a non-traditional approach to a lot of ideas and innovative practices. We encourage relationships across our group, as being a Pan-African bank promotes multicultural diversity. From inception, as a global brand, we have strived to include in our services the best strategies that develop and nurture employee engagement, thereby encouraging team relations and bonding.

As part of our ongoing, #CallitaTribe campaign we devised a Peer mentoring scheme that has benefited our new recruits. The idea is to foster relationships between staff;  to build friendships within the workplace.

Although mentor relationships sometimes occur naturally in the workplace, studies have shown that Peer mentoring has been around since ancient times, as people have taught fellow friends, classmates, and partners how to acquire new skills and both mentor and mentee would appreciate that you’ve enabled them to dedicate time to building new skills.

There is also real value to formally establishing a peer mentorship program, and at UBA, because we understand this, we subscribe to it and are aware of the long-term benefits to our employees and to our organisation. As Mentorcloud put it, ‘’…employees turn to their mentors for advice, they make fewer mistakes on the job, cutting losses to the employer.”

If your employees are also looking to get a promotion, Mentorship programs have been suggested to ignite that passion. It will give them the much-needed practice in coaching colleagues and dealing with complicated topics.

It was on this premise, we adopted the Peer mentoring platform as an exemplary outlet for celebrating International friendship day on August 5^th, 2018. The responses centre on trust, setting the stage for individuals to strengthen their relationships and, in turn, working more cohesively as a team.

Work at UBA does not revolve around just doing a job, it is an application of our skills in an environment that is conducive, happy, friendly and fun. We like to think of it as our workspace, where we redefine fun!!