Often in a company people rely on external professionals to embark on a path of personal growth. Those external professionals, thanks to Coaching initiatives, help to raise awareness of the abilities, to unleash the power and achieve better goals. In the Hera Group we have built a dedicated team and our competency model, defining the tools and the processes that every internal or external coach must follow. «The Hera Group has invested for several years in training and development to give employees real opportunities to grow. Our training plans are extensive and they act in two main directions: on the one hand they embrace everything about the technical-specific training, on the other the behavioral and values sphere,» says Alessandro Camilleri, Hera Group's Director of Development, Education and organization. «We worked a lot on these themes, starting from the fundamentals, namely from the evaluation and the dialogue between managers and resources. Then, we tried and we are still developing new employee management methods to take into account the specific diversities and to enhance the different phases of “life” of the employees.».
In this regard, Hera has then been developing for three years its hallmark coaching method which is a guide for planning specific individual paths and to spread skills and tools within the management in order to support the growth of its employees. An interesting example is the project “Welcome Back in the Group”, dedicated to the employees returning from their maternity leave. This is about a series of meetings led by a facilitator, an internal coach or counselor, to enhance the personal experience lived. In this way, the mothers discover a new awareness of the earned skills and potential through motherhood, which can be used profitably at work too. The campaign, started in 2013, involved more than 70 participants, each one for a path of six hours.
«The mentoring projects have undergone a significant transformation over time as well, both in the target and the content», highlights Camilleri. «Until a few years ago, the mentor was a senior manager who had the task of accompanying the professional growth of young talents. Today, however, mentoring has a different extension and capillarity: in addition to being included within specific processes (for example in the on-boarding program for new employees), it is a distinctive element within the process of development.» People, in fact, can offer themselves to become mentors or to be “mentee”, becoming protagonists of their own personal development.
«The counseling paths are used within Hera to manage the specific life stages of the employee and need to reflect on the relationship between the personal and the working sphere» adds Camilleri. “The Group invests heavily in the cultural spread of these themes through the possibility to activate individual paths of counseling within a large portfolio-of-initiatives of services for all the employees, included in the corporate welfare program. For example, there are internal paths dedicated to internal colleagues close to retirement or for those coming back from a long leave». These initiatives, in 2013, involved more than 20 employees.
