3 yrs ago

Meeting employees’ individual needs, understanding their motivations, and providing extrinsic rewards allow organisations to ensure the productivity and participation of their people. However, it has been proven that those are not enough to encourage them to stay. Instead, employees are more likely to feel satisfaction and realise their full potential when their employment entrusts them with important work and provides them with opportunities for personal and professional growth. A mentoring program is one option organisations can use to achieve that outcome.

Understanding Mentoring Programs

Mentoring programs are meant to help employees to find a mentor--usually a more experienced employee--to act as their guide and support system as they navigate the workplace and their professional development.

A mentoring program can cover a specific area, depending on the needs of the individual employee and the stage they are at in their professional journey. These areas can be any of the following:

• Peer mentoring - often facilitated to help new employees become familiar with the organisation’s culture, processes, and practices. 

• Career mentoring - where the mentor provides guidance to the mentee in navigating the career challenges they are facing. The mentor also acts as a coach, helping the mentee in their performance improvement, and also an advocate for their talents.

• Life mentoring - where the mentor acts as a sounding board, enabling the mentee to run their ideas and gain tools to reach their personal goals.

It should be noted that these sorts of mentoring can be delivered by the same mentor. And where an individual finds it difficult to have an internal mentor in their organisation, they can approach someone else outside who may have encountered a similar issue in the past. The point of mentoring is to make a genuine connection with people you admire and leverage their experiences and expertise to benefit you personally or professionally while also providing assistance to them whenever you can.

Important Benefits of a Mentoring Program in the Workplace

Back in the day, mentoring programs were limited to a chosen few. All too often, staff’s professional development takes the form of conferences, certifications, and technical manuals provided by the organisation. However, as organisations search for better ways to equip their employees and meet their individual needs, they realised that mentoring is a smart initiative that they have been disregarding for a long time. That was when mentoring programs become mainstream.

Today, more than half of the Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs in place. The concept is slowly taking hold in mid-sized and small organisations, with only about a quarter of them facilitating mentoring programs. Yet, these numbers prove that mentoring programs in the workplace are still growing and becoming an essential intrinsic reward employers must offer to employees. 

One of the best things about having a mentoring program is that it is a win-win for everyone involved. More importantly, majority of its positive effects can be for the long-term. Here is a look at some of the benefits that mentoring programs have in the workplace.

Better employee engagement

Employee engagement pertains to the proactive involvement of a worker in their work as well as the effort they put to establish relationships with their colleagues. A lot of organisations have tried a number of engagement strategies over the years, but with little to no success. The reason for this is that there is limited involvement and communication with employees, which means employers fail to understand their needs. 

By setting up a mentoring program, employers are able to create a more structured communication network for employees across levels. With that, anyone can enter in a mentoring relationship and establish habits of regular conversations with their teams and members, encouraging them to participate and share their own ideas and thoughts.

Development of a learning culture

Internally promoting a workplace mentoring program fosters a culture that prioritises employee learning and growth. When employees can access the guidance and support of more experienced colleagues as they go about their professional journey, the feel highly valued, giving them more motivation to learn and do better. Likewise, a mentoring program encourages collaboration, which is a necessary factor for peer learning and strengthening bonds between employees.

Enhanced career prospects, job satisfaction, and retention

One of the biggest fears of employees is stagnating in a role where their skills and potential are wasted. Unsurprisingly the LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report found that 94% of employees feel more satisfied and would stay with their current employers if they are provided with opportunities for learning and career development, which includes access to mentoring programs. 

Mentoring programs allow team members to leverage existing talents and experiences to grow their capabilities and learn about available opportunities within the workplace. Those things are proven to enhance job satisfaction of employees and ensure the retention of top talents because they know that the organisation is investing in them. In fact, studies have shown that employees who take part in a mentoring program are five times more likely get a promotion and a higher pay grade than those who do not, and mentors are more likely to step into leadership roles. Likewise, retention rates for mentees are significantly higher at 72% compared to employees who do not participate in mentoring programs at 49%. 

Improved diversity

Today’s organisations are dealing with issues related to diversity and inclusion. Despite efforts to introduce diversity programs in the workplace, only few are successful in enhancing the workplace experiences and outcomes for group members who usually face pervasive disadvantage, such as women and racial or ethnic minorities. 

Fortunately, mentoring programs proved to be an excellent solution for improving diversity in the workplace. According to the Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the presence of mentoring programs in organisations has helped raised the representation of minority at management level by 24%. The same study also established that mentoring programs helped grow the promotion and retention rates for minorities and women by 38%.

Now that you are aware of the benefits that can be gained from having a workplace mentoring program, here are a few things to keep in mind when setting up one in your organisation:

• Properly match employees to ensure that both mentor and mentee will gain value from the mentoring relationship.

• Do not make the program obligatory. Instead, give employees the freedom to decide whether they would like to participate or not.

• Set clear program guidelines and expectations, including frequency of meeting, possible outcomes, etc.

• Have some structure to the program, but ensure that mentors and mentees can customise their arrangement in a way that works for both of them.

• Put in the effort to market the mentoring program internally to encourage more employees to participate.

Are you ready to get involved in a mentoring program but do not know where to find a mentor? Speedy Mentors is a great place to discover what you are looking for. Through our platform, you can explore hundreds of profiles of professionals from different organisations and industries. They are ready to provide quality mentorship to individuals like you who would like to invest in their personal and professional growth.