BIM Implementation & Process/Culture Change - Part 5

We all understand the importance of mentor(s) in our lives, parents/teachers/senior colleagues and so on. Mentoring has profound impact not only on our lives/career development but also on businesses and it's profitability. Mentoring is directly linked to staff retention/employee turnover, one of the biggest challenges while embracing disruptive technology such as BIM. Besides this, the studies have found that employees turnover costs the U.S. economy an estimated $5 trillion, making it one of the most ignored significant economic factors in businesses.
 
Putting this in perspective, let's talk about how BIM can affect mentoring and facilitate win-win situation for businesses as well as employees.

Traditional mentoring pattern is mainly one way top-down where  juniors have to spend lot of years learning about how a building gets built, lets say. This results in a slow career development for juniors. Also, knowledge transfer is a big challenge with this model as it is done at the users' discretion and heavily depends on juniors relationship with seniors etc.

In BIM world this is slightly different. We are living in an Information/digital age and young generation want to learn as much as possible and as quick as possible. At the same time clients are demanding more, faster, and better, putting  pressure on businesses to look at the ways to meet their demands and as a consequence seniors are put into a relatively new (project delivery) territory.  The challenge for businesses is to establish a culture where young BIM savvy work force and seniors collaborate more efficiently to provide best of both worlds to meet the clients' demands. BIM facilitates this internal resource collaboration. Juniors can't model buildings without knowing how it will be built and seniors can't deliver project without knowing/using BIM technology. This is like a 'match made in heaven' from businesses point of view, No? This facilitates two way top-down and bottom-up knowledge flow resulting in automatic/efficient knowledge transfer. Also, this pattern accelerates juniors career development and builds stronger relationship between juniors and seniors.

Mentoring is one of the crucial factors affecting business culture and success. BIM will have a great impact on mentoring process/culture, mostly in a positive way.


Further reading:

"People are truly an organization's greatest asset. However, when employees perceive they are under-valued and go unrecognized, they can be an organization's greatest liability. The results of the most comprehensive labor study ever conducted were recently presented in a HR publication. The study found that employee turnover costs the U.S. economy an estimated $5 trillion, "making it the most significant cost to our economy and one of the most ignored economic factors in business history." The construction industry does not escape these costs. Many recent studies have shown that the expense of replacing a senior-level project manager can be up to 250 percent of their annual salary; a superintendent or entry-level manager, conservatively speaking, 150 percent."

Read full article here