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Client Spotlight

How GE Boosted Employee Engagement with 10KC

“Humans are wired to connect and a hybrid work environment shouldn’t impede employees from connecting with others. With hybrid work environments here to stay, companies and leaders need to adapt and symbiotically enable employee connections in an easy and automated way.”
Image of Karissa Bussard
Karissa Bussard
Global Senior HR Partner, Digital Technology at GE
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GE has always been a talent leader, embracing its people as its competitive advantage across its various business units and functions. For the Corporate Digital Technology team, its people strategy - which puts employees at the forefront of its operations - is centered around three pillars: grow, engage, and value.

Like many other Fortune 500 companies, its large, nationally-distributed workforce made employee connections and engagement challenging, even more so in the shift to hybrid work.

So when the GE Digital Technology team’s annual employee culture survey started to show there was an opportunity to improve some key areas within employee engagement — like an employee’s ability to grow and feel connected to the company — leaders, like Karissa Bussard, Global Senior HR Partner, Digital Technology at GE knew they had to act.

Making Mentorship & DEI a Priority for Employees

After reviewing data from the culture survey, focus groups, and exit interviews, Bussard and a team of GE Digital Technology leaders hypothesized that people within their function needed to be better connected to the company and each other to create a winning culture.

As a result, the GE Digital Technology team landed on mentorship as a key strategy to underpin culture and create boundaryless employee connections. Mentorship was always a key people tactic at GE, but the team wanted to scale and automate the offering, and needed a solution that was easy to use in a hybrid environment.

That led Bussard and her team to launch their first phase of their mentorship program using 10KC’s technology platform for U.S.-based employees who identify as women or minorities. While the program was focused on employee engagement, the Digital Technology Team Leaders also wanted to address their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) priorities by including these employee groups first, which paid off in the feedback they received.

We needed an inclusive solution like 10KC that was flexible and could work for introverts and extroverts alike. While people are generally interested and intrigued about others, they aren’t necessarily comfortable connecting with them on their own.”
Karissa Bussard
Global Senior HR Partner, Digital Technology at GE

The Success of the GE Digital Technology Mentorship Program

Within weeks of launching the mentorship program, employees were asking Bussard when she would offer it to everyone. The program saw an incredible 80% adoption rate among eligible participants and a 79% engagement rate.

The Digital Technology mentorship program leveraged 10KC’s technology, features and curriculum to:

  • Keep conversations flowing via automatic nudges and reminders to participants’ inboxes.
  • Smart Match participants based on their interests and goals which made participants feel comfortable meeting new coworkers.
  • Remove the biases and the time required to match people manually via Excel spreadsheets. According to Bussard, this manual approach could “take multiple hours or days”.
  • Input relevant topics about “co-authoring one’s career”, a key part of GE’s people strategy. They also added curated topics of change and growth to support other GE initiatives.
The Benefits of a DEI Mentorship Program with 10KC
REACH & SCALE
EASY TO USE
MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS
MEASURABLE RESULTS
REWARDS PARTICIPANTS
FLEXIBLE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

How Investing in Mentorship Paid Off

After launching the program using 10KC, Bussard and the leadership team started to see early positive results: “Our attrition rate decreased, our culture survey scores went up and the overall NPS regarding the 10KC platform was positive” she said. People felt more connected, and the results were reflected in their latest annual culture survey:

↑ Employee Career Growth
(GE’s annual culture survey)
↑ Employee Career Development
(GE’s annual culture survey)
↑ Inclusion
(GE’s annual culture survey)
↑ Connection
(Employee exit interviews)

In addition to the business outcomes and positive comments Bussard received, participants also had to say this about the GE Digital Technology team’s mentorship initiative:

“I am excited to see where this mentorship program takes us. I felt quite comfortable conversing with Sarah and feel that she would be able to impart wisdom when it comes to talent development and longevity.”

- Program Participant

“Perfect match! Both of us are from UCLA and Ryan already has experienced the path that I want to try to achieve which is filling a leadership position. Looking forward to future meetings and discussions.”

- Program Participant

What’s Next for the GE Digital Technology Mentorship Program

Bussard and her team will be moving into phase two by expanding the program to thousands of employees across the US for not only mentorship, but to also connect different business units via 10KC’s Introductions feature. Their goal is to create boundaryless connections within the company at scale and to ensure that they are holistically supporting their people’s development and creating a connected culture.

Start Your Own DEI Program Using 10KC

10KC is the leading enterprise software platform for mentoring, networking and talent development experiences. If your organization wants to start reaching their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals then our solution is for you.

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