Mentoring at work is no longer a luxury; it’s an imperative. Workers who don’t feel connected or who don’t see how your organization will help advance their careers are far more likely to quit. If current employment trends tell us anything about the nature of today’s workforce, it’s that we can’t just throw more money into people’s pockets and call it a day. Employees like higher pay, but it’s not what keeps them in the fold. Many companies are simply unprepared for historically low worker engagement levels and historically high turnover rates.
Mentoring at work for solving some of the largest issues riding under high employee retention rates. Mentoring effectively leverages your existing employee base to do it, as well, all while creating an environment where collaboration and sharing become normalized. In that way, mentoring at work not only builds your people’s skills and interpersonal connections but also strengthens your workplace culture.
Let’s take a sales team for example. In the US, the attrition rate of salespeople is often twice that of other workers. That may be true at your company, too. To solve the problem, you may decide to try offering new sales hires mentoring at work from the first day they’re hired. Your program could focus on pairing new sales hires with more experienced members of the sales team for 1:1 engagement and problem-solving.
New hires will know that when they run into issues, need to improve a skill critical for their role, or just need to vent frustrations, they have someone readily available to turn to as a resource beyond just standard training materials and guides. Adding that human element to talent development is invaluable, and there’s plenty of data to show that those kinds of workplace friendships also help reduce turnover rates.
Mentoring in the workplace can streamline training, but is not a traditional training program
Mentoring programs are uniquely different from traditional training programs — in a good way!
Traditional workplace training programs are usually:
- Tied to an inflexible curriculum
- Self-led or taught classroom style
- Leave little room for questioning and problem solving by the learner
Who Can Mentor at Work
Every individual at your organization likely has something to offer. Both junior- and senior-level employees can serve as mentors or mentees. It depends on the type of mentoring program you’re offering. With workplace mentoring, it’s important to think both strategically and broadly. The type of mentoring programs you offer need to solve critical business problems, whether that’s reducing turnover, improving engagement, or creating a pathway to help improve diversity metrics for your organization’s leadership. |
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Who Benefits from Mentoring at Work?
The simple answer is this: both mentors and mentees benefit from engaging in mentoring relationships. Mentoring programs tend to improve retention and job satisfaction rates for everyone involved — including the mentors. “You get out what you put in” as the saying goes. Although, with mentoring programs, you’ll usually get out far more than you put in. With increased employee engagement, upskilled and reskilled workers, and an improved and more cohesive company culture, getting as many employees involved in mentoring programs as possible tends to produce a huge payoff.
That last point is often the biggest reason why mentoring programs fail. When you can’t properly match participants, the relationships are less effective and lack the type of cohesion that produces results. And if you try to match manually, your program can’t scale. Likewise, if you can’t measure the success of your program, it’s not likely to get approved for expansion beyond the pilot.
MentorcliQ’s mentoring software utilizes research-based matching algorithms that create automated best matches for all mentor and mentee participants. Once matched, the platform can also help you track engagement, get satisfaction feedback, and measure the success and ROI of your mentoring program. By taking a software-based approach, you remove most of the roadblocks that easily derail traditional mentoring programs. Instead, you’ll help create a workplace mentoring option that leads to lower turnover and stronger workplace cultures.
Book a demo now to learn more about MentorcliQ’s award-winning mentoring software.