Growing Together at Work: Cultivating a Mentorship Garden

Workplace mentorship is critical for career advancement, sense of belonging, and well-being. However, historically marginalized groups face barriers to effective mentorship including misaligned commitments, difficulty establishing comfort with mentors, and relationship persistence. We explore how 3D virtual environment (VE) counterspaces, or spaces that center the well-being of marginalized people, can circumnavigate these barriers and generate dedicated environments for workplace mentorship. We present Mentorship Garden: a digital counterspace designed to facilitate mentorship communication around commitments, goals, progress, and well-being. We deployed Mentorship Garden with 10 mentor-mentee pairs, recruited from DEI mentoring programs at a large global company, and interviewed them about their experiences. Overall, Mentorship Garden provided a relaxing space for participants to engage in rituals supporting historically marginalized individuals via mentorship, but revealed potential challenges in seamlessly integrating it in the workplace. We discuss design implications for creating virtual mentorship counterspaces in the workplace and opportunities for future research.