Business mentoring provides its mentee with a confidential sounding board, thinking room and support system for making important but difficult decisions. Furthermore, mentoring builds employee loyalty and increases engagement.
Target objectives and KPIs of any program depend on your organization’s goals; for instance, these could include decreasing turnover rates.
Defining the Intent
Mentorship programs have multiple objectives; it’s essential that their goals be clearly articulated. Mentoring typically provides guidance and support to less experienced employees in order to increase job performance and enhance overall workplace experience.
Mentorship also works to increase employee retention rates. Studies have revealed that when organizations demonstrate commitment to training their staff, retention rates increase as does employee satisfaction with the organization.
One of the least appreciated advantages of mentoring programs is fostering diversity and inclusion (DEI). DEI mentorship programs provide companies with a great opportunity to develop leadership from different perspectives while showing they offer an inclusive workplace for everyone.
Mentorship provides managers the chance to form close relationships with their employees, which allows them to create a cohesive team and ensures everyone contributes equally – leading to improved productivity, project outcomes and employee engagement with the company.
Identifying Participants
One of the key elements of running an effective mentoring program is making sure participants meet certain qualifications. Mentors should have experience in your business and offer different perspectives from different parts of it. Mentees must be willing and eager to learn, open to receiving feedback and commit themselves fully.
Senior leaders can provide the ideal way to recruit both mentors and mentees by setting an example and encouraging participation amongst their own employees, which may help with uptake.
Promoting the value of mentoring programs requires using personal stories or video clips of mentors and mentees interacting. Surveys that ask about measurable outcomes such as increased employee engagement or promotion rates may also prove effective, provided they’re short and easy to complete – increasing completion rates significantly.
Developing a Plan
Once you’ve determined the purpose, population and structure for your mentoring program, the next step should be creating a plan. With MentorcliQ’s software and expertise available to them, MentorcliQ can help create an efficient plan that matches mentors with mentees, communicates during mentoring cycles, conducts surveys to evaluate satisfaction throughout and surveys post program completion.
Business mentoring provides an ideal way to gain a new perspective on your company, providing fresh eyes to see the challenges you are currently facing and help find ways to overcome them.
Mentors also gain access to a network of experienced businesspeople they can consult for advice and support, giving them an invaluable edge in their careers. Furthermore, mentoring also brings with it an immense sense of fulfilment from giving back. Not only can business mentors share their own experience with newcomers; many also possess decades-worth of institutional knowledge that would be helpful when beginning out themselves as entrepreneurs.
Implementing the Plan
Establishing the basics when beginning mentoring programs can be essential to their success. From how long each relationship will last to matching students with professionals and using milestones as indicators of progress measurement – MentorcliQ provides software and expert assistance that can guide you through each of these questions to ensure your mentoring program will be a hit!
Successful mentoring programs combine structure with flexibility. To keep participants on the right path towards productive learning and reaching their goals, setting measurable objectives is often helpful. An effective way of setting mentorship program objectives is by drawing up a workflow diagram which details all steps involved from enrolling new participants through meeting objectives, meeting them, assessment and final review. This will also assist in devising your communication and surveying plan for the program. At the conclusion of each mentoring cycle, ask participants to fill out an interview or survey to gather feedback and strengthen future programs. For example, Nielsen’s global mentoring program earned them a Brandon Hall award for Diversity & Inclusion while helping their associates meet professional development and business goals.
