During my HR summer internship at Dow, I was assigned to work on two projects. One on employee satisfaction, and the other one working as the Summer Internship Program Ambassador to help engage the 34 summer interns and provide them a fruitful and meaningful internship experience. I had one supervisor, who is one of the function leader. I was also assigned two mentors who each guides me on my two projects.
For the ambassador project, I mainly served two principals: the group of summer interns and my project mentor. But in addition, I also needed to report to my supervisor, who evaluates my performance at the end of the internship.
As an ambassador, my job is to support the summer internship program leader (my mentor), help her to design and organize activities, and also work individually on some other tasks (4 deliverables) including e-newsletter (internal use) & social media engagement (external use), creating a summer internship video, creating a summer intern alumni book, and also internship program feedback analysis. The ultimate goal of all the work is to ensure summer interns a good experience and sustain the impact for campus branding.
My mentor wanted to provide the interns a great experience, while the interns for sure is also expecting a meaningful experience. So they actually have a similar goal, but even though what they expect from me is quite different. Their definition of “a good experience” is also different.
My mentor for the ambassador project is a very young woman (just a few years older than me) with a lot of creative ideas. She previously worked for Unilever in Singapore and have just came to Dow for a few months. She was in charge of the Management Trainee program when she was in Unilever, and she wanted to implement a lot of the Unilever successful projects in Dow’s summer internship program. However, due to the industry difference, the intern group in Dow is very different from the trainees in Unilever. Unilever as a fast-moving consumer goods firm, their trainees are mostly marketing/branding people, which are mostly extroverts, they are active and creative, and enjoys exciting activities and experiences. On the other hand, Dow as a chemical and manufacturing firm, their intern group are mostly composed with science and engineering students, which are usually very practical and down to earth. And most R&D interns are final year PhD students, which means that the age group is also very different. Asking interns at Dow to be very active is quite difficult, but that was what my mentor expected.
My mentor’s expectation was reflected on the 4 deliverables she assigned me. She wanted me to create a e-newsletter in a fun way to help interns better know each other and therefore promote cross-function communication. I had difficulties to decide what to put in the e-newsletter, because I actually thought that this is unnecessary and meaningless. The summer internship is a 6-week structured program, and everyone had their own projects to work on. The majority of the group are R&D interns. It could be imagined that how difficult it is to work on a real industry research problem, conduct experiments, and come to a conclusion in 6-weeks’ time. So the interns’ focus is on how to perform their work better and deliver a better presentation in the end, they actually didn’t care (they just didn’t have the time to) that much about knowing each other or learning about different functions. They may spend a few minutes reading the e-newsletter, and then they’ll forget it forever… For the summer internship video, my mentor expected a very exciting video maybe with different teams shouting their slogans or making creative postures. This kind of video seem fancy but I feel it is too deliberate and does not do much good to the interns, and I was sure that nobody would be willing to participate in this kind of video. Later I convinced her to create the video in another way that the would be more comfortable for the interns and also doesn’t require too much work from them, and it turned out pretty well. All I wanted to do is to try not to occupy too much of their time, so that they won’t feel any burden, or feel being overwhelmed by all kinds of activities and requests. Beyond these, the summer internship experience sharing (to be posted on social media) and alumni book also requires the interns to put in some time and attention, which distracts them from their work. One or two activities/requests may seem fine, but with all kinds of activities held each week, plus these extra work my mentor expected, under the pressure of their own project and also the group case competition (as I mentioned in my previous post) in such a limited time… I just don’t want to bother them too much. Towards the end of the internship, I was crazy busy as well. As a HR intern, and also as the program ambassador, I tried to make things easier for other interns, so I ended up having even more workload.
During the process, my mentor kept coming up with new and creative ideas, some of them are great, but given my situation with my other project and case competition in hand, it just seemed impossible to implement all of the ideas. I tried to balance the expectations of my mentor and the needs of the interns. It was quite difficult to change the intern’s needs, because their workload and project is fixed, and performing a good work is no doubt their first priority, so I putted more effort to change my mentor’s expectation. One of the reasons they assigned this ambassador project to me is that they hope with me acting as the bridge, they could identify the interns’ real needs and hear the voices of the interns, therefore they could improve the program in the future. So communicating the situation to my mentor and adjusting her expectation wasn’t extremely difficult.
The issue might also be solved if I exactly followed my mentor’s requirements, and ignored the interns’ needs. I might be able to gain a pretty good evaluation from my mentor, but I think it will negatively affect the interns’ experience. This might affect their decision whether to work for Dow or not in the future, and when they share their experience with their friends, it damage the Dow’s campus brand. I will feel very uncomfortable as well, so I would not see this as a good choice.
I think communication is a good way to resolve the tension between different principals. Although usually different principals have different standpoints, in my case, my mentor thinks about what is good for the firm and how it could help them in campus branding, while the interns think about whether they could perform well during the internship, secure a return offer, or will this experience be useful and bring them opportunities for other positions in the future. Figuring out the common interest and develop ways that satisfies the fundamental goals of both principals through communication seems to be a good solution.
Your example is one where people take their expectations based on their prior situation, particularly your mentor, and then trying to apply the approach intact in the new situation, even if that situation is quite different. That is apt to lead to tension because the new situation demands a different approach.
ReplyDeleteI find myself somewhat in the same position as your mentor, but with respect to the class. I'm basing my approach on how the class has been in the past. But it is different this time.
It also seems to me that Dow had you doing too many task, so some issue was likely to come up. Maybe that is the new normal now, but it seems to me that even very good interns shouldn't be overburdened with different obligations. It is a way to make them fail and to ultimately not want to work for the company.
Thank you Prof Arvan for your comments.
DeleteI think taking approach based on people’s prior experience is a common way when people deal with new situations. As long as people could adjust, I believe things will gradually work out fine. I think it’s necessary to constantly ask for feedbacks and keep the communication channels open. But it is not easy to create an environment where people are always comfortable and willing to share their thoughts and provide candid feedbacks.
For the workload at Dow, yes… I during my time there, I felt I was overwhelmed by too many tasks in hand. I felt that everything was perfect, the experience, the firm culture, the learnings from the internship, the pay, as well as the friends I made there. The only thing was that I’m too busy. They have said that they designed their internship this way to see how interns deal with multiple tasks and how they perform under pressure. I can understand their reason behind but I felt that I might have had a better experience and might be more willing to work for Dow if I wasn’t that busy. The principal-agent problem also appeared several times during the internship, although not that intense. I had a supervisor, two mentors, and I also worked with another department head (one of the projects is under her function). They had different standards, and they gave different advices, sometimes they slightly contradicted. I had difficulty dealing with those issues. But it didn’t really evolve into a big problem because we communicated pretty often and didn’t make their expectations differ that much.
I think the intersection between old and new ideas can be beneficial to personal growth, as well as company growth. It can get easy to do things the way that they have always been done when interacting with the same groups of people. I think it would be good for DOW's last year PhD to get to know the younger interns. However, I see how the amount of tasks that you had to complete may not have been beneficial to your personal growth, especially if they seemed like busy work. Appealing to the lowest common denominator is apparent in most other aspects of my experiences and I'm not surprised that you found that to be a reasonable solution.
ReplyDeleteWhy is the interns’ definition of a good experience different from the mentor’s definition? It seems like the interns are the “customers” and the mentor/company provides the “good” which is the internship. In order to keep customers coming back year after year, it seems that the company would have to cater to the students wishes. So wouldn’t their definition of a good internship experience align with the definition that Dow has set?
ReplyDeleteIt seems like there were very high expectations set for the R&D interns. This would, if expectations are met, be good for the company, but it seems like the interns were being stretched too thin. Part of a good internship experience is about networking and getting to know possible future co-workers. If the R&D interns just didn’t have time to get to know each other, they must have had too much work on their plates.
Though the social media techniques seem important for Dow, you are right in saying that involving the interns in it distracts from their work. It seems like the company was focused on making it look the interns were having a great experience while giving them so much work that it was hard to actually have that great experience. It was good that you helped both the interns and your mentor by lifting pressure from the interns while still producing a quality video.
Your solution of communication seems adequate - I think also that the interns could have been in more direct contact with your mentor. Maybe if they gave feedback halfway through the program, the mentor would bring her ideas down to earth to make expectations of the interns more manageable.