In the plumbing contracting world, there are established hierarchies and traditional ways of doing business. An apprentice learns the trade from a licensed journeyman or master plumber — someone who is usually older and more experienced. However, one new approach offers a path to fostering growth and innovation, bringing a range of benefits to contracting businesses. It’s called reverse mentoring.

By pairing seasoned professionals with younger employees, reverse mentoring creates opportunities for cross-generational learning and drives adaptability. Younger mentors can introduce insights on new technologies, digital tools and evolving customer preferences, while senior professionals bring industry knowledge and practical experience into the dialogue. For contracting businesses, reverse mentoring offers a unique opportunity to build a more agile and adaptable workforce, enhance knowledge-sharing, and cultivate an inclusive company culture that values contributions from employees of all ages.

PHCC held a panel on reverse mentoring during its CONNECT 2024 conference and trade show in Birmingham, Alabama, last month. Tyler Arndt, master plumber at Brooklyn, Wisconsin-based Arndt & Son Plumbing and newly appointed PHCC — National Association secretary, was one of the panelists.

“I’ve been working with my father ever since I was a kid,” Arndt says. “We had other plumbers in the business at different ages, and I think they saw me as a good candidate because I’m coming into the new era and trying to implement new technology into the business. The way my dad always did it was the paper and pencil route. Also, the reverse side of that is he’s taught me all the plumbing skills, how to figure out billing hourly rates and things like that. He’s taught me his knowledge, and I’m teaching him the new school of technology.”

Arndt says he thinks reverse-mentoring should help impact employee retention for contractors who employ it.

“Ultimately, if you get along with your coworkers, it feels more like friends at work than just a coworker,” he says. “Having reverse mentoring would help cultivate that type of workplace culture. It expands on communication between everyone, which, in turn, helps build a good culture between all the employees, no matter their age.”

Arndt says that type of openness also helps eliminate competition between employees. “The culture we have [at Arndt & Son Plumbing] is more of, ‘You help me, and I’ll help you.’ Some of the older guys may not want to teach the young guys because they think they’re going to be replaced by the younger generation being closer to retirement age. You’ve got to plant that seed for them to open up to each other and talk.”

His advice for fellow contractors is to start out having weekly company Toolbox Talk-like meetings and talk out real-life situations to start the collaborative chatter amongst employees. “If you start the conversation, then they’re going to take it outside of that meeting as well. I hire for culture at our company. I can train someone if they're if they're willing to work, but I'd rather hire for the culture because sometimes that's harder to teach. If you have a good culture between an older group of people and a younger group of people with commonalities, like say what they like to do outside of work, it makes it a lot easier for them to talk right off the bat than it does if they don’t have anything in common.”

Reverse mentoring can also be difficult, Arndt acknowledges. “Sometimes the older generation will have pushback, especially with the technology, new tools and products nowadays. They have done things a certain way for 30 years and don’t want to change, so they have to be receptive to these new things that can make our lives easier.”

The key thing to remember is there is no right or wrong way of implementing reverse mentoring into a business.

“It’s all about how each person perceives it,” Arndt says. “There’s 100 ways to do one little task, and there’s never a wrong answer. The biggest thing is just finding a way for it to work in your company for your situation. The key takeaway from the discussion was, should you have it? Yes. Do you need it? Yes. Find a way to make it work for you.”