Employees who are engaged show up early, stay late and are passionate about their work. When employees aren’t engaged they can be sluggish, depressed, have low productivity and bring the company down by simply going through the motions form 9 to 5 and churning out low quality work.
Engaging employees goes beyond getting them excited about company goals. You do have to get your employees on board with the overall messaging and mission of your company, but this isn’t enough to unlock their potential.
Employees need to be connected on a personal level to a company. The best tool to accomplish this is mentoring.
Mentoring Programs leverage your company’s greatest assets - tried and proven veteran employees who are ready and willing to pass on their hard won experience.
Here are 3 ways mentoring can boost employee engagement:
One - Mentoring infuses education into work
On-boarding, on the job training and employee training are part of every company's normal operation. These types of education are usually highly generalized and broad. Your company’s on-boarding training might suit some newcomers while confusing others. It’s virtually impossible to create broad shoot learning programs in a one-size-fits all format.
People are different. When employees are mentored they get one on one coaching that can be tailored to what they need help with. You may have a genius numbers guy who really struggles with public speaking and getting his ideas across. On the other hand, you could have a fantastic people person and naturally presenter who struggles to pay attention to details. A cookie-cutter approach to employee training won’t help them. They need tailored mentoring and coaching to help them improve their skills and benefit the company.
A mentor can be assigned to employees and infuse their day-to-day with learning experiences, advice and coaching all outside the structured chain of command resulting in increased productivity and engagement.
Two - Mentoring Opens Communication Channels
Employees often feel they can’t communicate grievances, troubles or even positive ideas directly to their superiors. Managers and superiors (even the nicest and most approachable ones) can be intimidating and difficult to talk based on their seniority alone.
Having a mentor gives an employee a sounding board. Someone to share ideas and frustrations with. Work can be lonely. An office or big company can sometimes seem like a massive machine they lowly employee is ignored by.
A mentor breaks these communication barriers down by making it safe for an employee to openly express his or her thoughts about life and work. By simply providing a mentor, a company shows its employees that it cares about their well-being, wants them to communicate to veteran staff members and engage them.
Three - Mentoring Adds Responsibility
Employees want to be engaged. Work consumes such a high percentage of a person’s time that if they are unhappy at work they are likely unhappy in life. Everyone wants to be engaged and passionate and enjoy what they do.
Employee engagement comes about when employees feel connected to their work on a personal and professional level. Employees who are engaged also organically take on more responsibility and work more diligently on their individual tasks.
Most employees want more pay and understand that this comes with additional responsibility. But employees don't want to accept more responsibility for no reward or extra pay.
Mentoring brings about daily changes in an employees life. These changes bring about an increased mental connection to their work which translates into employee engagement and passion in the workplace. People naturally take more responsibility for things they care about and are engaged without giving it much thought.
Engaged employees will work more responsibly as they are personally and emotionally connected to their work.
Mentoring helps with so many aspects of employee engagement that entire textbooks have been written on the subject. The basic thing to know is that when formal mentoring programs are executed correctly, everyone wins. Companies can economically engage, enhance and boost productivity using the simple but powerful tool of mentoring.
Mentor Resources can help any company to leverage technology to create tailored career development programs that are cost-effective. Our mentoring software - Wisdom Share is a cloud-based program that is simple and comes with guided workflows. Included are tools for administrators to attract, enroll, connect, and guide participants. We also provide analytics to ensure you can monitor your employee development program and easily see ROI metrics.
Reach out to us today for a Free Demonstration of our software.