Use Mentoring Software to Help Retain Employees
What are you doing to retain your employees? Offering them more money? Letting them work from home? Giving them free lunches?
You may want to rethink your retention strategies. Research from Glassdoor shows that compensation is only a small part of the retention picture. “Workers who feel they’re stagnating in their jobs or who don’t feel their company has a mission or purpose may be more likely to look elsewhere for professional satisfaction,” write Aimee Picchi and Irina Ivanova in their article about the research (“Your next job move may not be for more money,” February 15, 2017, CBS Moneywatch).
Money matters, but this research highlights that it may not be the top way to retain employees. Company culture and job advancement play a bigger role in making people want to stay at your company than their salary does. Pay them fairly, treat them kindly, and give them something to believe in and work toward—that will make for loyal employees.
One way to accomplish these goals is by establishing a mentoring program for your employees. Having a mentoring program goes a long way to forming and enriching your company culture. It helps people connect with and learn from one another, which is the foundation of a solid company culture where people respect and value one another.
A mentoring program can also give you a way to help your employees build skills and passions that will impact their job advancement. If people are constantly learning and growing through mentoring, the chances that they will stagnate in their jobs diminish (especially if you have developed a culture that encourages continuous growth and advancement).
Starting a mentoring program should be done with a clear focus and goal in mind; in fact, you need to have clear parameters, goals and plans for your mentoring program. Randy Emelo and Chris Browning of River hosted a webinar on designing mentoring programs, in which they give details on the primary design elements you need to consider, as well as a few examples of mentoring designs that our clients use. Here are a few ideas from the webinar:
- Connect mentoring to a business purpose. It needs an anchor or connection to a business issue.
- Blend formal mentoring with informal mentoring, and tie it to defined programs to make it stick (e.g., hi-po development, leadership development, training support).
- Use mentoring to increase abilities, skills and confidence in your employees. Support your employees to make them successful.
- Use three mentoring program design elements to help you define and design your program: outcomes, audience and types.
- Use role-based mentoring programs to help with retaining knowledge from your retiring workforce.
Mentoring can be a wonderful incentive to enticing people to stay at your company. Watch our Designing Mentoring Programs webinar today to learn how you can accomplish this in your organization.
Contact us to learn more about River and to speak to mentoring experts who can help you do more with mentoring.
