Michelle Rodger: Treat interns like valued employees and your firm will reap the benefits

MANAGER to intern: “I need you to run some errands for me. I need a sky hook and some tartan paint. You’ll find both of them in the warehouse beside the long stand.” Oh, how we laughed.

We don’t tend to treat our interns well, do we? It’s probably not surprising when you consider the dictionary definition of intern: to restrict or confine within prescribed limits, as prisoners of war, enemy aliens or combat troops who take refuge in a neutral country.

The real-life definition of an intern is only slightly better: cheap or, better still, free labour, generally used for tea-making, errand-running, carrying out customer surveys and picking up all the rubbish jobs no-one else wants to do.

Neither of them is particularly appealing, nor are they truly representative of the tangible – and often financial – value that an intern can bring to an organisation.

Too often it’s not seen as anything more than a loose arrangement for a couple of months, after which you write the intern a superficial reference and they whack the grossly exaggerated experience on their CV.

Opportunity lies in an internship, but most of us in SMEs are just not conditioned to look for it. Major corporates are marginally better in that they often have intern initiatives, but the reality of taking in several hundred graduates a year, pushing them through a rigidly enforced set of training programmes and indoctrinating them into the way they work doesn’t allow for the entrepreneurial stars to shine.

If you want to make the most of employing an intern – and the employing bit is essential, you should always pay an intern and treat them like a valued employee – the starting point is establishing a tangible project for them to do. It should be capable of completion within the time frame of the internship, but it must be something that will have a positive impact on your business.

Step two is finding the right intern. Chemistry is important, and I don’t mean as a degree. For this to work, the intern and the CEO/management team must like, trust and respect each other.

Maeve Gillies is president of MaeVona, based in New York. A young Scottish jeweller and designer, Gillies has hosted interns from her home country in her company and says the chemistry is very important. She views the synergy with anyone she does business with as a marker of how successful the partnership will be. If the fit is right, the intern can hit the ground running, get creative beyond the basic brief and exceed expectations.

Gillies says for an internship to work well you need a well-planned project, with weekly goals, deadlines and reviews. For example, for an eight-week project, she allowed one week for bedding in, then she devised seven weekly short projects that were to be launched live each Friday, and she changed this slightly to fit what the intern was producing as the project went on.

Helen Sayles is senior VP of Liberty Mutual Group and a trustee of the Saltire Foundation. Her organisation runs a large internship programme for university students and believes the value of the programme is that both the company and the intern get to “try before we buy” so that if they make a job offer and it is accepted, both sides know what they are getting into.

“What we get out of that is the delight in helping them develop, grow and see the life-changing experience that the internship can bring. They also do good work while they are here,” says Sayles.

Both Sayles and Gillies agree interns should be paid. Gillies says: “The difference in motivation between an intern paid a small stipend and one receiving nothing is striking. If a company stands to gain more value than they invest in the project, a financial incentive makes sense on both sides.”