Is Your Mentor Program Doomed to Fail? 3 Steps to Ensure Success

Is Your Mentor Program Doomed to Fail? Three Steps to Ensure Success.

HR can be tricky. There are so many intangibles and opinions about how to motivate employees, improve retention rates and keep the place happy while achieving company goals. Not every tactic works the same on every employee because everyone is different. But, through years of experience and working with employees in virtually every industry and corporate level, Mentor Resources has isolated common denominators within the workforce. These have been used as the basic building blocks to create a mentoring system that produces measurable success so you can ensure your mentoring programs achieves its purpose. 

Before a successful mentoring program can be launched, the Big Picture needs to be clear – Why does this mentoring initiative exists? What problems does the mentoring program need to solve?

Here are a few objectives and their respective approaches to mentoring.

Improve Managerial Skills and Competencies – The various levels of management would receive mentoring geared towards apprenticing in soft skills and competent handling of employees. Specific weaknesses can also be pin-pointed within managers and these can be addressed through matching managers with good mentors who can help them overcome any deficiencies in their performance.

Bolster Leadership – Mentoring is the perfect way to cultivate and retain high potential employees. Matching high potential employees correctly with a good mentor can unleash their true potential and turn them into company leaders who stick around for the long haul, driving the company to new levels.

Retain and Transfer Knowledge – Mentoring can be used to pass knowledge throughout the ranks of employees. Let’s say a company has a handful of company veterans who do the bulk of the work and there is a new young team of employees coming on board. Veterans can be properly matched with new comers to help show them the ropes and through good mentoring pass on vital operational knowledge that would otherwise be lost.

Create an Inclusive and Diverse Company Environment – A mentoring program can be implemented to help under-represented groups. Skillful matching can build a work environment where special interests groups and minorities harmonize with the rest of the workforce creating an inclusive company culture.

Facilitate on-boarding – Mentoring can be established for all new employees within their first 6 months of employment. High-end skills and complex roles can be grooved in smoothly through mentorship.

Retain High-Value Talent – Too often talent leaves for another company. Sometimes it’s for money and sometimes it’s because employees don’t feel they can grow anymore in their current job. Mentoring plays a huge role in increasing retention rates. High engagement of mentees with their mentors fosters loyalty and commitment to one's organization. A High-Value program can focus on career planning and boosting personal development resulting in increased retention of talent.

Step Two – Establish Key Performance Indicators

Once the Big Picture goal has been defined and the type of mentoring approach has been decided upon, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) need to be established to measure success. Key Performance Indicators will tell you how successful the mentor program is. A few basic KPIs are:

• Acquisition of participants

• Behavior within the program

• Outcomes at an organizational level

Using these KPIs will help you locate the cause of mentoring success or failures. Without proper KPIs there is no way of telling if the program is successful or not. For example, the mentoring program has a very high employee satisfaction rate amongst employees who have completed a partnership, but membership numbers are really low. This tells you that the area to focus on is getting employees to enroll. There are various ways to do this: sharing successes throughout the company, offering incentives to join the program and simply making it known that the program exists are a few tactics to increase membership.

Here are a few examples of objectives and their respective KPIs.

Retain Talent – Retention Rates, Employee Engagement, Employee Satisfaction

Create an Inclusive, Diverse Culture – Advancement rates, Retention Rates, Employee perception of the company.

Improve Managerial Skills and Competence – Internal promotions within managerial ranks, Improved job performance ratings, Number of sessions and goals completed on average per mentee.

Step Three – Implement Mentoring Software

Once Big Picture goals have been established, the type of mentoring approach can be clearly defined. Next, KPIs are set up to measure the mentoring program’s success. This is where software can make the difference. Mentor Resources software provides several features to facilitate the mentoring process on a broad scale:

• Matching: Mentor Resources is expert at creating perfect matches using compatibility assessment, tests and technology. In conjunction with software, employees are matched up with mentors and all this data is input into software where it can be used to run a successful mentoring program.

• Analytics: Track program and individual connection progress.

• Reports: View real-time performance and export detailed reports of KPIs for further analysis.

• Surveys: Acquire vital feedback from participants throughout all phases of the program.

Mentor Resources has mastered this entire process. Trying to do it on your own can seem daunting. Schedule a free demo with Mentor Resources and you’ll get a complete overview of how to take the above actions, achieve your HR goals and pull off a successful Mentoring Program.