A Plan for Mentoring in the Workplace
Here at River, we use the phrase “Do More with Mentoring” as a rallying call for people to embrace the possibilities that can occur with mentoring. From mentees and mentors to administrators and companies themselves, we see the value that mentoring can bring to each group.
Mentees and Mentors
In research we’ve done with our clients:
- 91% of mentees said they experienced competency improvement in one or more of the areas that they worked on in their mentoring relationship.
- 88% of mentors and mentees agree that their productivity or effectiveness increased due to their current mentoring experience.
- 83% of participants said mentoring helped them enhance skills they need to perform their job.
Clearly, mentoring can have a tremendous impact on people. Because of their participation in mentoring, they can do more…more in their jobs, more for their coworkers, more for their clients, more for their organizations, more for their communities. To say this another way, mentoring helps them develop the skills, attitudes, talents, traits, and know-how to take the next step in their careers or to push themselves to be better at their current jobs. Through this advancement, they become better employees, colleagues, and coworkers. With mentoring, they can do more for themselves, their lives, their careers, their families, their companies, and their communities.
Mentoring Administrators
When we encourage our mentoring administrators to do more with mentoring, we are pushing them to envision possibilities in relation to their mentoring programs. We want them to see where they are currently using mentoring, the initiatives in their companies that they connect mentoring to, and then urge them to expand their view. Can they identify other areas within their organization where mentoring could make an impact? Are there learning or development programs currently running in their company where mentoring could enhance the outcomes and enrich the participants?
Doing more with mentoring in terms of administrators means they should:
- Reflect on where mentoring is currently being used in the organization
- Assess which employees are impacted and if it has been successful
- Evaluate what other learning and development initiatives exist where mentoring could be useful
- Determine the business need for mentoring in those other areas
- Identify key stakeholders for those initiatives to begin conversations and socializing mentoring as an added solution for their program
- Introduce other champions and stakeholders to River mentoring software to show them how they can configure and run their own programs within the framework of a larger mentoring solution
Organizations
When companies bring River in as a mentoring solution, we help them identify the business need they can address through mentoring. This is critical to assessing and measuring success. It also provides the foundation upon which organizations can build their mentoring culture.
When organizations do more with mentoring, they not only impact their bottom line in areas such as employee retention, engagement, and productivity, but they also impact their employees by helping them develop critical skills that can help them do their jobs better. Organizations can:
- Achieve greater diversity through mentoring
- Build a stronger leadership pipeline through mentoring
- Get more value out of their training courses by connecting them to mentoring
- Attract and retain talented employees through mentoring
They can ultimately do more as a company because they offer mentoring, and conversely, their employees can do more because they have opportunities to engage in mentoring.
