How To Create a Mentoring System That Improves Employee Development
If you want to retain your employees and boost their overall happiness, consider creating a mentorship program.
Whether you’re working with freelancers and contractors over the web, or you’ve got a traditional office full of professionals, you need a solid strategy to ensure everyone’s on the same page. One of the best ways to help any business thrive is to show your team members that their needs and the goals of the business are aligned. For instance, today’s teams want to know that they have a future in their career.
Your employees need to see a path into the future in your business. That means promising them opportunities for personal and professional development. Providing plenty of learning opportunities for your employees doesn’t just make them happy. It also means that you can access some of the top skills in your field – without hiring new employees.
If you want to encourage learning and team bonding at the same time, a mentorship program could be just the thing. Mentoring systems are excellent for getting people in your organization connected and spreading knowledge. So, where do you get started?
Plan Your Mentoring Strategy
A good mentor is more than just a teacher to your employee. These professionals are a source of inspiration for other team members. They offer support and guidance during professional challenges and even help staff to look at problems from different perspectives. According to one case study, employees who participated in a mentor program were five times more likely to get promoted and improve their pay grade too!
Before you can bring your mentoring plan to life, you need to figure out what it’s going to look like. Do you want a more formal mentoring system, where people are assigned to mentors based on their skills and goals? Maybe you want something more casual, where people can approach anyone in your team and ask them to be a mentor.
You might also want to think about how the mentoring program will tie in with the daily operations of your business. You can either allocate specific hours of the workday to mentoring or let employees decide to participate on a task-to-task basis.
Figure out what your system might look like and pick a group of “beta testers” for your strategy. These are the people who can test how well your plan works before you roll it out to everyone else.
Balance Freedom and Structure
A lot of companies will want to let their employees choose their own mentors. This is a great way to ensure that you end up with mentors and mentees that mesh well and have similar personalities. However, just because you give your teams some freedoms, doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be any structure in your mentoring strategy.
For starters, it’s a good idea to ensure every mentoring plan starts with a goal. Check-in with your groups and find out what they’re going to be working towards with their new mentors. What kind of milestones do they have in place to check their progress? Is there enough practical work going on so the mentor and mentee can see their progress?
Watch out for signs that a partnership isn’t working too, such as:
Failure to communicate properly
Lack of clear goal-setting or progress
Arguments between team members.
Lack of efficiency or deadlines not being met
People refusing to work together on certain projects
Gather Feedback and Data
Whether this is your first attempt at mentoring or your fiftieth, the more information you have, the better off you’re going to be. Gathering feedback from both sides of the mentor relationship will give you a better insight into what works for your team. The more you learn from each attempt, the easier it will be to find the right pairings in the future and push the right results.
Remember, there are tools out there that can help you to track progress. Project management tools like Asana and Trello aren’t just for business assignments. You can also use these systems to see if your mentees are accomplishing their personal targets and following up with mentors. This will be even more important if the mentoring takes place between remote teams and you can’t check on their progress by simply stopping by at their desk.
Try to get plenty of qualitative feedback. In other words, don’t just ask your staff to rate their mentoring experience on a scale of one to ten. Make sure they explain what they liked and didn’t like about the experience.
Let the Mentoring Relationships Evolve Naturally
Even if your team members find an excellent mentor for themselves the first time around, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to stick with that person forever. As our goals and expectations change, the things that we need to learn will evolve too. This means that it’s important to let staff members move onto new mentors when they feel it’s a good idea.
You could even suggest mentors that might be relevant to your employees whenever they make a change in their career. For instance, someone moving into a management position might need help from someone who has recently made the transition themselves.
A remote working employee might need some help from another remote worker for tips on how to manage time and productivity. A benefit of coworking spaces is that they offer plenty of opportunities to connect with and learn from such professionals.
Don’t be afraid to match-make if you understand your employees and their goals well enough.
Keep Your Team Members Happy and Engaged
Mentoring programs are more beneficial than most people think. This isn’t just a great way to let your team members teach each other and share some practical skills. Mentoring can build bonds between your team members that help everyone to work together as a more efficient team. A mentor can also help employees move through transitional periods in their life, such as the shift to a new office or a mobile working strategy.
More importantly, giving your employees somewhere to turn for help and guidance is a great way to boost employee satisfaction. A lack of growth opportunities is one of the leading causes of high employee turnover. The more your team members can see a future with your business, the happier they’re going to feel as part of your team.
In a world where many companies from almost every industry are struggling with holding onto valuable employees, it pays to have mentoring as part of your retention strategy.
Heather Redding is a part-time assistant manager, solopreneur and writer based in Aurora, Illinois. She is also an avid reader and a tech enthusiast. When Heather is not working or writing, she enjoys her Kindle library and a hot coffee. Reach out to her on Twitter.