INCREASING THE BOND BETWEEN WOMEN

Actively shaping career paths: the accenture female mentoring program | Best Practice by Accenture, Switzerland

How can we ensure our female talents have a strong sense of belonging and connection to Accenture while developing their careers? Our response to this question was the formation of a cross-divisional female mentoring program, which gives women the opportunity to connect with more senior colleagues with whom they would not usually cross paths. 

This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.

Read the report

We believe mentoring provides a platform to build lasting relationships with female role models already in leadership positions. It is a win-win: The role models get better insight of female talents at Accenture and the mentees increase their personal visibility in a natural relationship-building way.

RETAINING OUR FEMALE TALENT FROM THE OUTSET

At Accenture, we have a strong career coaching and feedback culture which is based on the career counselor model. In addition to the existing structures, we set ourselves a new ambition to build a platform for female talents to connect with more senior female leaders and role models – from one woman to another. The main premise being to enable mentoring, development, and career shaping through another point of view outside the regular stakeholder group. Our goal was to proactively manage female talents, enabling them to grow their network within the company, let them benefit from the experiences of other women and support them in actively shaping their career paths. This, we believe, ultimately leads to increasing the female retention rate.

• Andrea Hopfgartner

  Management Consultant and FeMale Talent Program Lead at Accenture, Switzerland

A MANUAL MATCH MADE WITH PRECISION

The FeMale Mentoring Program connects female mentees and mentors and fosters meaningful relationships to the matched pairs’ benefit. The program is open to Accenture women up until Managing Director and independent of business unit alignment.

We designed the FeMale Mentoring Program as follows

• During the registration process mentees choose from a set of criteria to specify their mentoring needs and wants e.g. career growth, access to network, leadership development, work-life balance or working parent.
• The mentees can indicate a preference for 1:1 matching or mentoring group (up to 4 participants).
• Mentors follow a similar procedure, choosing which areas they cover and wish to mentor female talents in.

INSTRUMENTS TO SUCCESS: A DEDICATED PROGRAM TEAM AND OPEN MINDS OF SENIOR LEADERS

We first launched the initiative in 2014 and decided to set it up as an annual stand-alone series. The FeMale Mentoring Program runs from April (registration) to February (closing). To launch each series, we run marketing campaigns on e-mail and intranet channels while many colleagues reach out through word of mouth. In addition to our kick-off call, we also organize local get-together events for all participants to exchange best practices and foster learning. To measure our success and obtain feedback for improvement, we send out an anonymous survey at the program’s closing. Every year, the program receives great quality feedback which motivates the team to introduce enhancements and integrate new formats in the following series.

EXPANDING THE PROGRAM BY INVOLVING MALE SENIOR LEADERS

In 2017, we started to involve male senior leaders as mentors. The motivation was twofold: first to have a reverse mentoring effect so that senior male leaders become more sensitive to the topics and concerns of female talent; second: to bridge the gap between junior female colleagues and male senior leaders in a safe and approachable format.

95% WOULD RECOMMEND THE FEMALE MENTORING PROGRAM

“The FeMale Mentoring Program offers a platform for future female leaders to step up their game in a male dominated surrounding and has the potential to provide the tools to develop an authentic female leader personality.” (Mentee, 2019)

When we launched the program in 2014, we had less than 100 participants in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Six years later, we have more than 850 mentors and mentees in the same region, with 110 participants Switzerland based. Through the feedback survey we know that 95% would recommend the program to their peers and 90% have a good or very good relationship with their mentor.

RETAINING FEMALE TALENT BY BRINGING WOMEN TOGETHER

The FeMale Mentoring Program gives female talent the opportunity to connect with senior colleagues with whom they usually would not collaborate, allowing them to learn from each other in a safe space and grow professionally as well as personally. In a competitive market such as consulting/professional services, the mentoring program is a valuable tool to increase the bond between women internally across hierarchical levels and to foster belonging and career perspectives.

We believe any company can benefit from the mentoring approach for people development. To launch a mentoring program, we encourage you to have a clear goal with purpose as well as structure in place to ensure guidelines and direction.

www.accenture.com

This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.

Read the report