THE BIG E-BOOK OF

MENTORING

Pretty much everything you

need to know
CONTENTS

3 An Introduction to Mentoring

4 The Benefits of Mentoring

17 Mentoring for an Organisation

18 HR and Onboarding

27 Learning and Development

31 Diversity and Inclusion

34 Improving Employee Retention

37 Establishing an Effective Mentoring Program

61 Developing Mentor-Mentee Relationships

70 Measuring the Success of a Mentoring Program

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MENTORING

We love mentoring. And because you are here, we think you

might too (or soon will).

This big e-book of mentoring is a compilation of our readers

favourite mentoring blog posts, assembled and presented
here to give you a pretty thorough overview of the world of
mentoring and mentoring programs.

The book is sectioned into reasonably distinct chapters, so

that you can easily navigate to the section/s most important
to you.

Or read everything and become the mentor master I think

you were destined to be.

I hope you enjoy it, learn a little, and become more

equipped to make mentoring more mainstream than ever.

Enjoy, and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

The Mentorloop team

3
 The Benefits of Mentoring

5 This is why employees need Mentoring, More Than Ever

8 5 Reasons a mentor will always be better than Google

11 40 Mentoring Program Benefits You Don’t Want To Miss

15 4 Ways a Mentor Can Benefit Your Career

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 This is why your employees need
Mentoring, More Than Ever

Employee mentoring has always been an important asset of any organisation –

both on the supply-side (mentors), and the demand-side (mentees). Today, it is
equally beloved, with the latest studies pointing to the fact that 66% of
millennials want a workplace mentor – and that 75% of the millennial
demographic consider mentoring critical to their success. On the other side of
the mentoring equation, 75% of executives credit their mentors with helping
them reach their current positions, a stat which makes it obvious why so many
experienced employees choose to give back in the form of mentoring.

So we know that the desire for mentoring is there. But mentoring today is a lot
more important than that, because it serves as an insurance policy in an
increasingly precarious workplace.

If mentoring was ever just a nice-to-have – it no longer is today.

An uncertain future

A mentor is arguably most helpful at crossroads; a point in time when an

individual or employees feels uncertain of which road to take at a pivotal juncture.

These cross-roads are becoming more and more frequent as the world evolves
ever more quickly. 10 or so years ago, a graduate could choose their career path
and make incremental progress in the knowledge that they had a decent runway.
Today, recent graduates – and all employees – are being told that the profession
they have spent 4 or 5 years studying – or 10 or 15 years working in – is about to
be redundant, with various studies pointing to the fact that 40% of all jobs are at
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risk of automation by the year 2025.
While most mentors can’t explain to their mentees what the future will look like,
they can provide guidance on sensible steps to move forward and mitigate the
chances of failure. A mentor can also provide reassurance against uncertainty – a
priceless benefit of mentoring – that rapid change has also been happening
during their whole careers (even if at a slower pace), and that change is good so
long as you’re proactive in adapting to it.

The rise of services

As more and more jobs are lost to automation and increasingly sophisticated
products and technologies, it will become increasingly important for employees
to focus on and develop soft skills; skills like leadership and communication.

We have seen what happens when manually laborious jobs like manufacturing are
taken away; service jobs take over as people have more time – and more money
– to spend servicing the needs and wants of other people. Managing and
collaborating in this new people-to-people economy requires skills which are
developed through channels like mentoring – not online courses. Mentoring
provides employees with the universally applicable skills to overcome the
inevitable upheaval headed our way.

The remote workforce

Companies and work teams are becoming more fractured every day. Flexible and
remote work are becoming the norm, with 34% of business leaders saying more
than half of their full-time employees will be working remotely by 2020. Most
employees appreciate these changes – but fail to fill the old void that workplace
interaction and cross-departmental discussion historically added to their lives.
Modern mentoring solutions i.e mentoring software, enable these people to stay
connected to their professional network – even when working in different
timezones and continents.

Remote mentoring enables employees to maintain strong and productive human

relationships with others at the company, which is extremely important in
maintaining strong company culture – but also in improving the mental health
and retention of each and every employee.

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A sense of belonging

Millennials get a lot of attention when it comes to their workplace traits. But most
observers fail to see the root cause of these traits – and the underlying thread.

Millennials are simply looking to make their work a deeper part of their lives. They
care about progress in the workplace because their identity is more closely
aligned with their job than ever before; they care about purpose in the workplace
because they see this as purpose in their lives; and they want to have strong
connections and engagement with the people who they work with because they
see work and their fellow employees as their second home and family.

Mentoring plays a pivotal role in these needs, and will continue to do so as the
workplace continues to veer in this direction. It provides young professionals with
another channel for the progress they deeply desire; it allows them to act on and
pursue the purpose they crave; and allows them to develop the professional
connections they need in an increasingly disconnected world.

Mentoring has always been an incredible tool, which is why people have always
wanted to experience it – and why companies have often offered it.

But it’s no longer a nice-to-have.

Your employees – and all of us – need mentoring.

More than ever. 7

 5 Reasons a mentor will always
be better than Google

Many (most) people would choose access to Google over access to a great
mentor, and understandably so. Google, and its essentially-infinite library of
resources, is an incredible tool for gaining knowledge and learning stuff. We all
lean on it in our everyday lives.

But, there are a number of things that Google does not – and cannot do. Things
which are critically important to generating tangible value in our lives. And these
things are the driving force behind the reasons that mentoring will always be
better than Google.

Yes, better than google.

Google has way too many opinions

Have you ever been midway through an argument with someone, when you both
begin furiously googling targeted queries to prove you were right? Of course you
have. And I bet you found that credible source that perfectly aligns with your
argument.. only to be refuted by your friends also-credible source which aligns
with their side of the argument.

Well, that’s the problem. No matter what you search for on Google (and when
you search you are always suffering from confirmation bias), you will always find
your answer.

In contrast, a good mentor doesn’t try to find your answer. They try to find their
answer to your dilemma. When you ask a mentor a question, they are looking for
holes in your thesis, position, or argument. They are vetting your idea in a way
that Google just can’t do. Google’s achilles heel will always be that the mentee or
‘information seeker’ will always be searching for the answer they want to see – to 8
the question they want to ask.
Google provides information – it doesn’t create action

Google is the world’s largest filing cabinet of information made easily accessible
and highly relevant. It does this really well. And yet, what most people need isn’t
more information. It’s action.

A person’s appetite for information is never satiated. You can research how or
how not to do something forever; but until you actually get started, it’s all kind of
superfluous. Google is your worst enemy when it comes to hoarding information
and encouraging inaction; there is always something more to learn, a new insight
to gleam, or a new opinion to digest.

Alternatively, in the world of mentorship, you combine your current information

(likely more than enough) with your gut instinct (which is more accurate than you
think) and get started. Your mentor helps you believe in what you’re doing, pull
the trigger, and improve your execution, leaning on their own pitfalls and
mistakes to ensure you don’t make the same ones.

Google doesn’t hold you accountable

Once you are started (if you ever stopped googling), Google doesn’t do anything
to hold you accountable for your action or lack thereof. In fact, all Google does is
make you question your decision by searching for and finding the reasons that
you shouldn’t do something. And to make matters worse, the most disruptive
ideas, technologies and companies often go against the most commonly held
perception or most ‘relevant article’, adding to your dismay.

While a mentor on the other hand, does hold you accountable. They check in on
you, they want updates, and they want to see you follow through on your vision
and ambition. As humans, our weakness isn’t not being able to think about stuff,
as thinking is an involuntary thing we all do at least 15 hours a day; our weakness
is not getting stuff done – or giving up too soon.

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Google is a distraction

When you want to get something done, Google might not be the most efficient
path. In fact, it might be just about the worst. Google is the deepest, darkest
rabbit hole that’s ever existed. It implores you to keep searching – and keep
clicking – and do anything BUT start that word doc or powerpoint presentation.

In contrast, no matter fun-loving your mentor is, you are going to touch base on
what’s going on personally and professionally. You are going to take an action
step or plan away from the conversation or meeting.

So next time you want to get started, sit down with a mentor away from Google,
and tell them you want to start. They will make sure you do.

Google doesn’t know you

Finally, and most importantly, your mentors will know you. They will know all of
your quirks, instincts, and desires – and cater their mentoring accordingly. They
will make you work on your weaknesses, play to your strengths, and ensure you’re
more likely to succeed.

Google doesn’t know you. It knows your cookies, your search habits, and your
personal details, but it does not cater its messaging to get the most out of you.
Unless you’re talking about getting the most money out of you, in which case its
advertising and re-marketing efforts very much do cater to you.

But if you are looking for honest feedback, catered support, and to be held
accountable for your action or lack thereof – get a mentor. He or she will be far
more valuable to you than Google (Don’t worry, you can still use Google as well).

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 40 Mentoring Program Benefits
You Don’t Want To Miss

At least 71% of Fortune 500 companies run formal mentoring programs.

So there must be something beneficial about them right? Absolutely.

There a lot of benefits to mentoring programs; benefits for the mentees; benefits
for the organisations; benefits for the mentors; and a bunch of benefits for society
too. So here is your list of 40 mentoring program benefits (& not an exhaustive
list) that you definitely don’t want to miss out on.

Benefits for the mentees

1) New development opportunities: Who doesn’t want another channel to better

themselves?

2) Increased confidence: We all need someone who can encourage us to do that

thing we might otherwise not.

3) A larger network: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.. right?

4) A more valuable network: Mentors are trusted confidants. And they will go to
bat for you if you show them why they should.

5) Accountability: Have a ‘goal’ that you never really pursue. Having a mentor
there to ask how that goal is progressing makes all the difference to your
motivation (or fear).

6) Real-life advice: Sure Google can answer most of your objective questions, but
Google hasn’t been there (Here are 5 reasons mentoring will always be better
than Google).
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7) Human connection: We could all do with a bit more real interaction.

8) Applicable advice: Who is the best person to tell you about how to become a
VP of Sales? Probably that VP of Sales.

9) Improve communication skills: Communications skills can always be improved

through.. communication. Especially with people of different backgrounds and
expertise.

10) Improve leadership skills: If your mentor is more senior than you, you can
learn a thing or two about what it takes to be a leader.

11) Improve management skills: Learn how to manage professional relationships.

That’s what managers do.

12) Personal progress: Great mentoring = great progress.

13) Career development: Employees who receive mentoring are promoted 5

TIMES MORE OFTEN.

14) Find a connection: In company mentoring programs, having a mentor can

better connect a mentee to management – and the organisation itself.

15) Empowerment: Every employee should feel like they can control their career
and destiny. Mentoring can do that.

Benefits for the mentors

16) Give back or pay it forward: People enjoy giving back and having an impact
on other people’s lives.

17) Reverse mentoring: Think mentors have learned it all? Think again. Reverse
mentoring is becoming increasingly popular in a quickly evolving world (Read:
why CEO’s need mentors too).

18) Enjoying the experience: We asked some of Australia’s best mentors what
was in it for them – and 50% said they simply enjoyed mentoring.

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19) Access to a talent pipeline: What better way to find the next rising star than to
help raise them up?

20) Keep your finger on the pulse: Your mentees know all about today’s
consumers. And know all about the latest in technology, fashion etc.

21) Ego boost: Nothing says ‘I’m important’ more than someone leaning on your
advice.

22) Improve management skills: What better way to learn management skills than
to manage without all of the typical management attachments.

23) Bridge the every other generation-millennial divide: Millennials aren’t so

different. See how well you get a long with the often misunderstood cohort.

24) Become an even more valuable asset: Sure your work and experience is
good. But imagine how valuable you could be by multiplying that impact by
making others great too.

25) Increases knowledge share: The more value we share, the more value we
create.

26) Improve interpersonal skills: Learn to be a better listener. Learn how to give
great advice.

Benefits for the organisation

27) 75% of millennials deem mentoring critical to their success: Your organisation
has millennials.

28) Leadership development: Managerial productivity increases by 88% when

mentoring was involved, versus only 24% with training alone.

29) Retention: Retention rates have been much higher for mentees and mentors
(72% and 69%) than for employees not involved in mentoring programs (49%).

30) Recruitment: More than 60% of college and graduate students listed
mentoring as a criterion for selecting an employer after graduation.
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31) Improve culture: What better way to improve your culture than to connect
those within it.

32) Transfer culture: Have your most senior advocates pass down their passion
and vision to more junior employees.

33) Increase knowledge share: Have a bunch of tacit knowledge embedded in

your experienced employees? Get it out through mentoring.

34) Increase diversity: Empower underrepresented groups by giving them the

support, encouragement and sponsorship they need to succeed and become
great employees, managers etc.

35) Improve inclusion: Is there a better way to expose people to different

backgrounds, departments, skills, and experiences?

36) Onboarding: Develop employee skills faster, and make them feel more
welcome with an employee mentor.

37) Shed a positive light on the organisation: Shows that the organisation is
willing to (and want to) invest in its people.

Benefits for society

38) Creates a culture of giving back: Imagine how much better society would be if
everybody paid as much attention to giving back – as they do to craving help.

39) Helps bring people off the sidelines: Mentoring has typically been reserved
for the select few or ‘high potentials’. What if mentoring was made available to
those who really need it; those who’s lives it could change.

40) Creates interaction and connection: In an increasingly (connectedly)

disconnected world – it would be nice to see people creating real connections
and real relationships, with people outside of their ‘normal’ circles.

And unsurprisingly, there are still a plethora of other benefits

associated with running mentoring programs too.

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 4 Ways a Mentor Can
Benefit Your Career

Most people understand that a mentor can help them, but they don’t necessarily
know by just how much. Mentors can have a dramatically positive impact on a
person’s career, with studies showing that professionals who have used a mentor
earn between $5,610-$22,450 more annually than those who don’t, and that 75%
of executives say mentoring has played a key role in their careers.

So why does having a mentor make such a difference? In what ways does it
improve your career?

A career coach

One of the most important parts a mentor plays in your life is that of a career
coach. Anyone who attempts to make progress at any activity usually has some
type of coach or teacher: students, athletes, and apprentices – and yet many of
us go through our careers with little to no help, and no semblance of a coach. A
coach provides you with feedback, suggestions, and objective oversight from
which you can glean great learnings. A coach or mentor in this case, can use their
own experience and wisdom to guide you in a way that you couldn’t guide
yourself.

A voice of encouragement

Equally important, a mentor provides a mentee with frequent and relevant

encouragement. We all have a lot of self-doubt; it is human nature, and there isn’t
an individual on the planet who can not benefit from some good old fashioned
encouragement. Having doubts about starting that company? Or writing that
book? A mentor is the type of person who you bounce these ideas off and get a
push in the right direction.
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More efficient time management and more efficient growth

Doing a lot of stuff isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to make progress.
Being strategic and purposeful about your personal and professional growth is
the key to making quick and sizeable strides. A mentor not only provides you with
a sounding board and good advice, but also allows you to look internally, and
look more closely at your personal goals and aspirations. This means you can be
more efficient and purposeful in setting about creating a more coherent journey
to your destination. While a mentor is an external motivator – they often force an
individual to have a deeper and more focused internal locus of control.

Accountability

As much as we all like to think of ourselves as being incredibly driven and

motivated people, unfortunately we aren’t. All people can benefit from being
held accountable for the things they say they will do. A mentor keeps you on your
toes, and in a positive way – forces you to consciously think about the actions you
are taking and the progress you have made.

While a mentor isn’t the only way to spur career growth, it is one of the most
universally beneficial ways to tap into elements of personal growth that apply to
every individual. If you can’t benefit from a coach, a voice of encouragement,
more efficient time management, and being held accountable – then you are not
human, and you are on your way to success anyway.

If you’re interested in finding a mentor but are afraid to ask, don’t be. There is a
tonne of value in a mentor-mentee relationship for the mentor – and they’re likely
just as eager as you.

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 Mentoring for an Organisation

HR and Onboarding
18 How Mentors Improve the Awkward and Costly Employee
Onboarding Experience
23 Examples of Best company Mentoring Programs
Leadership and Development
27 Mentoring for Learning and Development
Diversity and Inclusion
31 Mentoring for Diversity and Inclusion
Improving Employee Retention
34 How can Mentoring help Employee Retention

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 How mentors improve your awkward
and costly employee onboarding
experience

Recruiting great employees is incredibly tough, which might be why it gets so

much attention.

Retaining employees is also incredibly hard, and costs organisations billions of

dollars per year – which is why it gets so much attention.

But there is a segment of time between the two which fails to garner much
attention, and works magic on both recruiting and retention. And that is
employee onboarding.

Employee onboarding is an often underestimated portion of an employee’s

tenure. Once the hire is hired, it’s all plain sailing until such a time when people
start looking elsewhere, right? No, wrong.

22% of staff turnover occurs in the first 45 days of

employment and 33% of new hires look for a job within
their first six months.

So what can HR, P&C and L&D teams do. First, create intentional structure.
According to a 2007 study by the Wynhurst Group, when employees go through
structured onboarding, they are 58% more likely to remain with the organization
after three years.

The easiest way to create a structured onboarding process? Buddy up your new
hires with a current employee mentor, who (with some process) can guide the
new employee through all the tricky (and enjoyable) parts of being a new hire.
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The reality of most employee onboarding schemes

Step 1 – Wait at the door/reception/foyer feeling extremely awkward as people

go about their jobs.. Or worse, glance in your direction.

Step 2 – Be greeted by someone with a really welcoming workplace misconduct

brochure.

Step 3 – Go through an ‘induction’ which may or may not include video content
which should have died a long time ago.

Step 4 – Break for lunch where you need to balance your need for not disrupting
the status quo and incumbent groups with not looking like a complete loner.

Step 5 – Awkwardly scuttle to your desk/cubicle to start ‘working’ for your new
company.

Now, it’s obvious that companies must legally go through some of this stuff. But
it’s also unclear as to why the rest of the day (and often the first few days) are so
poorly managed, when there is a feasible and easily accessible way that
organisations can make their onboarding process much better – without spending
5x times more money or completely overhauling their HR and talent teams.

And it involves leveraging the recruits you already have – and connecting every
single one of your new hires with an experienced employee – or mentor.

What benefits does an experienced employee and mentor bestow upon a new
hire?

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The role of a mentor in onboarding

1. The mentor kills a massive portion of the awkwardness associated with a

first day in any environment; greeting the new hire straight away;
normalising the whole situation by showing the new hire the ‘ropes’; and
just being there.

2. The established employee provides access into their own network and
employee circles during the first days and weeks of an employee’s tenure,
providing a support network for the new employee moving forward.

3. The mentor can start playing an early part in the mentees development –
whether they are in the same department or not.

4. The mentor may end up sponsoring the new hire for promotional and
leadership opportunities (77% of men and 68% of women who have a
sponsor reported being satisfied with their career advancement).

5. An established employee (with a positive affiliation towards the

organisation) ensures that a good and empathetic first impression is set.

Beyond this, the mentors of this type of program also benefit. They feel more
valuable to the organisation, create new acquaintances, and feel more
embedded in the culture too.

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Retention starts here: beyond the first day

And the benefits go well beyond the first day for new hires – and for the
organisation. Zynga is a great case study and one of the great examples of how
new hire mentoring can impact organisational outcomes:

‘Zynga wants their new grads to be challenged and integrated into the culture –
but also wants their mentors to be challenged too through reverse mentoring,
with fresh new employees bringing new ideas and an outside perspective.
According to their website, both parties work together to innovate, learn from,
and challenge one another in a dynamic and stimulating environment.’ And their
grad program begins with a weeklong, mentoring driven, onboarding bootcamp.

These types of formalised practices create tangible workplace change. Think

about the impact that a perpetual cycle of new hire onboarding will have on your
workforce – where every new hire is grateful for their mentor, and every new hire
eventually pays-it-back by becoming a mentor.

Measuring onboarding success

So you do implement a mentor onboarding program at your organisation. How

do you know if it’s working?

Early turnover

One of the surest signs of great onboarding is low new employee turnover. The
absolute number is not what is important (right now), but the relative number to
your organisation is.

Take a look at (or begin tracking) your new employee turnover – and then
measure against that after implementing a structured onboarding sequence.

Effective onboarding should seep through all levels of retention too; so you
should see improved retention all the way up and down tenure.

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Employee satisfaction
A well-onboarded employee is also going to be more satisfied with their first
couple of weeks and months. Implement a 90 day feedback survey to see how
the employee enjoyed the onboarding process – and where they feel it could be
improved.

Culture
Culture is a pretty soft term, and isn’t easily measured. But you can sometimes
feel it. Providing your new employees with a mentor buddy should impact the
mentees (new hires) and mentors (current hires). And between these impacts and
increased interactions, your culture should improve and become more inclusive.

Making a good first impression is all about setting the right tone. It’s about
establishing an early precedent and saying ‘hey, our employees love our
company and we love them, so we are going to let them tell you about it’. After
all, you work with other employees – not a company.

On average, it takes an employer 52 days and between $750 and $3,800 to fill an
open position. But you will get a MASSIVE return on this investment if you do the
right thing by your employees – starting on the first day.

Don’t leave employees to figure it out on their own, even if they do have the help
of a workplace misconduct brochure.

If there is one thing which every new hire needs to maximise their development
and tenure at your organisation; one thing that can help new hires feel welcome
and integrated; it’s an employee mentor who has been through and survived
(maybe even thrived) the exact same environment that they themselves are
navigating today.

It’s time all organisations started leveraging their most powerful form of social
proof and a far more unbiased party. It’s time organisations started making better
first impressions.

After all, it’s the only one you get.. (as if you haven’t already been told).

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 Examples of the Best Company
Mentoring Programs

We are mentoring advocates first – and a mentoring software company second.

We would love to live in a world where every company does mentoring right. But
we don’t.

In fact, mentoring is often one of those invaluable people programs that often
ends up in the check-box category; implemented to fill a void or gap in an
organisations people and culture quota – but never really invested in, measured,
or emphasised as a tool for creating real change for employees or company.

This is a real shame. Because companies and individuals who are involved in
good mentoring programs see very real and tangible results; results like
increased engagement, increased satisfaction, and increased diversity.

So to give you a bit of inspiration on your way to building a better mentorship

program, here are a few of the best examples of company’s doing mentoring
right today.

Deloitte

Deloitte, the giant accounting firm, has institutionalised mentoring in a way that
ensures their leadership pipeline is bursting at the seams. The name of the
program, the Emerging Leaders Development Program, does exactly what it is
intended to do: develop future Deloitte leaders.

Much of the strength of their program lies in its focus and commitment.
According to the Deloitte website, each program participant is assigned a
partner, principal, or director sponsor who commits to at least two years to help
their protégées drive their own careers by helping them understand how to
navigate their organisation. 23
Deloitte increases retention and company commitment by keeping the mentoring
focused on how to further their careers, specifically at Deloitte, whilst also
committing two whole years to the endeavour, fostering strong and reliable
mentorships.

The programs participants are typically high-performing minority managers,

which also improves the inclusivity of the program, and in-turn – inclusivity and
diversity at Deloitte.

KPMG

Another of the big 4 accounting firms is doing a lot right when it comes to
mentoring. At least one of the channels for mentoring at KPMG revolves around
the all-important CPA (Certified public accountant) exam. As an integral part of
accounting – and a major part of their employees career progress and success –
KPMG leverages a lot of their resources on supporting their employees before,
during, and after their CPA exam. This not only helps to ensure that they are
developing their employees (which results in great returns for them), but also
really helps their employees, as one KPMG employee reports:

“KPMG has an exceptional pay it forward culture. At every step of the CPA
process I was surrounded by colleagues and mentors who had successfully
navigated the program. Their willingness to mark cases and support me along the
way was phenomenal.”

The strength of this arm of KPMG’s mentoring repertoire lies in its applicability to
the job, and the relevance of mentoring. KPMG mentors can speak to the CPA
exam as well as anyone else, which makes their support and advice relevant and
trusted.

24
Zynga

Zynga, a leading developer of the world’s most popular social games, has made
mentoring an integral part of their onboarding and development process.

Zynga wants their new grads to be challenged and integrated into the culture –
but also wants their mentors to be challenged too through reverse mentoring,
with fresh new employees bringing new ideas and an outside perspective.
According to their website, “Both parties work together to innovate, learn from,
and challenge one another in a dynamic and stimulating environment.” The
framework of Zynga’s mentoring program starts at day one – and continues to
grow, “As part of our new grad program we jump start you with an intensive,
weeklong boot camp that brings you up to Zynga speed. After six months, you
can apply for other positions within Zynga and try a new team or even a new
location.”

Their mentoring program serves as a core part of an employees entire tenure.

Hires start with onboarding mentoring; transition into mentoring promoting
workplace flexibility and progress; before the mentees become mentors and the
whole process repeats itself in a perpetual cycle of knowledge transfer. This
results in great outcomes for the company.

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Intel

Intel takes a slightly different approach to many other Fortune 500 companies.
Rather than focus on hierarchy (connecting junior employees with senior
employees), Intel focuses on specific knowledge transfer and domain skills that
are in demand right now.

This philosophy is grounded by the fact that everyone has something to learn –
and everyone has something to teach. Intel’s mentoring program is less formal
and more embedded in the culture, resulting in more organic connections.

The strength of Intel’s mentoring program lies in its impetus; rather than a
coordinator managing and overseeing the program like a hawk, employees take
much of the process into their hands and take charge of their own learning. This
results in more engagement with the program, as well as a deeper sense of
autonomy and mastery for the employees, which serve an innovative company
like Intel very well.

The secret sauce: there isn’t one

Each of these company’s mentoring programs are great examples of the type of
mentoring program your company should endeavour to build. They also illustrate
that each mentoring program should and will be different. Because each will align
with the overall goals and culture of the company – as well as the specific goal of
your people programs (succession planning, diversity and inclusion, learning and
development etc.).

While there is no perfect formula for your mentoring program, these examples
prove that the key to creating a good mentoring program and great employee
outcomes is the same as creating a good anything: invest the necessary time,
money, and effort into making it work.

Mentoring shouldn’t be a checkbox category – because it can make a real

difference. You can start building an enviable mentoring program by checking
out some of our best mentoring program resources.

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 Mentoring for Learning and
Development

Mentoring is one of those great people programs that can be used to combat a
number of organisational gaps or deficiencies: learning and development,
diversity and inclusion, retention, and workplace culture – to name a few. But
today, I am going to touch on mentoring for learning and development (L&D)
specifically, although there are obvious and undeniable positive externalities with
attempting to address any single deficiency through mentoring.

The first thing to do when pursuing employee learning and development

outcomes through mentoring is to assess which (and how many) employees you
are looking to engage in your L&D driven mentoring program:

Option 1) HiPo mentoring:

HiPo mentoring (or high potential mentoring) is a selective mentoring strategy. It

involves filtering and selecting the employees who management sees as having
‘high potential’, and connecting them with a current leader or manager who can
help them develop in ways that sets them up for personal and company success.

HiPo mentoring can be extremely effective, given that high performers typically
have a higher propensity and motivation for ongoing development. The
downside is that this strategy suffers from the universal law of diminishing returns,
whereby it’s harder to get more potential and output out of someone who is
already getting close to maximising their potential through outlets like mentoring,
reading, side-hustles, and goal-setting.

ACTION STEP: Find and outline the employees who have been earmarked as
being future leaders, and chart their likely company progression – matching them
with a mentor who can best speak to what this role (and path to the role) entail.
27
Option 2) Democratised mentoring:

The other solution is a more democratic approach to mentoring. An approach

where all, or at least a large group/division of employees, is informed of the
upcoming mentoring program. This group is told of the benefits and
expectations of the program – and then left to declare their interest or register.
While most of the HiPo employees will likely sign-up anyway, this approach
brings those often left on the sidelines (the majority of people) into the fold,
offering them a new and potentially previously untapped opportunity for new
learning and development.

In our experience, there is often significant latent demand for mentoring – and
learning and development – amongst all employees. Many of the employees who
quietly go about their jobs, have a deep latent desire for progress and support.
And often times, they are set to gain the most from a mentoring relationship
which offers them support, encouragement, and confidence.

ACTION STEP: Inform your employees of your intent to run a mentoring

program using a flyer/marketing sheet like this. Gauge demand for the program
amongst all employees, and then find a scalable mentoring solution (See
Mentorloop’s features) to meet the demand.

The next question you must ask when building a learning and development
oriented mentoring program is what type of development are you looking for
your employees to engage in?

Option 1) Tacit (and internal) knowledge transfer:

Tacit knowledge, in contrast to explicit knowledge which can be codified and

passed on to new employees in the form of manuals, documents, and content, is
difficult to transfer. It is difficult to disseminate tacit knowledge through – and up
and down – an organisation. This is where mentoring becomes extremely
valuable as a development tool: company practices, processes, or ‘secrets’ that
can improve productivity and company performance can be transferred to newer
less experienced employees.

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This type of mentoring ideology is often termed succession planning – and is
used by both large organisations and small family owned businesses. Many
traditional and hierarchical business models (sales skewed organisations are a
great example) can benefit massively from internal knowledge share.
Management and senior employees have a treasure trove of nifty tricks and a
wealth of job-applicable knowledge to share with more junior employees.

ACTION STEP: Outline what your company will look like in 5 years. Does it
look similar? Are the roles, structure and functions similar? If they are, then
knowledge share is likely a great goal for your program.

Option 2) Personal development:

Alternatively, an internal corporate mentoring program can be self-development

oriented. And while the goal of these types of programs is to facilitate personal
development, the results of obviously have a very positive impact on that
individuals company in the shape of improved performance, motivation, and
confidence. However, in contrast to the goal of a more company focused
development program, this type of program should be based on providing the
employee with new and interesting ideas, resources, and extracurricular
challenges.

ACTION STEP: Supplement the mentoring program with a number of personal

development tools and resources including suggested podcasts, articles, courses,
blogs, and books. These tools, combined with useful goal setting resources like
our goal-setting framework, encourage and inspire mentoring program
participants to explore new habits, practices, and opportunities that instil a
personal passion for learning and development.

Now, once you have selected the type of employees you are going to onboard
into the mentoring program, and built the program framework, collateral, and
communications to reflect the type of development you are trying to inspire in
your employees, you need to measure the outcomes of your program. Because
the program is L&D oriented in nature, without some form of measurement, it is
impossible to understand whether there were tangible learning outcomes.

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Progress reporting:

The easiest and most effective way to do this is via personal reporting. While
tracking program engagement and frequency of communication can be used to
assess the success of the program, the most important element of the program is
the outcome (hopefully some learning and some development). So for that
reason, the most important thing to do in terms of measuring the success of the
program and overall learning and development is to take an initial survey of the
mentees goals and milestones – and then measure against these goals and
milestones periodically or at the end of the program.

ACTION STEP: At the beginning of the program, have mentees state the goals
and milestones they would like to achieve during the program. While these may
change, it provides them (and you) with a yardstick with which to measure
progress. Making sure initial goals are set (via a goal-setting spreadsheet) is also a
very effective way of measuring personal progress for the mentees. Then, at
some point in time (during or after the program), conduct a survey or set aside
some time for participants to reflect on these goals and milestones – and share
their outcomes.

While a lot of people, companies, and mentoring solutions speak to the power of
mentoring as a learning and development tool, they often fail to see the nuance
in how you approach a specific program goal with specific program inputs.

While there is no right or wrong way to approach mentoring for learning and
development – there are ways to better align your approach and program
infrastructure with your program and company-wide goals.

So when assessing the type of L&D outcomes you would like to see your
employees (and your company) gain from the experience – make sure that you
have thought through a few of these things.

Need help in building an effective learning and development driven mentoring

program? Mentorloop is your mentoring software and mentoring consultant.
Reach out to us: info@mentorloop.com.au

30
 Mentoring for
Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) are hot topics right now, and for good reason.
Inclusive teams are more engaged and productive; diverse teams have been
proven to outperform non-diverse ones; and not many (if any) companies have
been able to truly solve the diversity dilemma.

Mentoring is a go-to program for companies trying to move the diversity and
inclusion needle. But, as we have found, a number of companies running D&I
mentoring programs do not execute them in the right way or are misguided in
their initial approach to building the program.

So here are some of the things that you need to be asking yourself when
implementing a mentoring program for D&I purposes.

Diversity or inclusion?

Diversity and inclusion are different lenses with which to look at the same
problem. As we like to say – diversity is the end-goal, and inclusion is the means
by which we get there. So while not mutually exclusive, hopefully you will be able
to see the marked differences between the paths of inclusion and diversity, and
which one best aligns with your D&I goals.

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Inclusion: The company-wide approach

The inclusive approach to mentoring is a more company-wide and culturally

integrated approach. It involves offering mentoring to all employees who are
willing, able, and eager to participate. Approaching diversity in this way expands
the scale, legacy, and institutionalisation of the program outcomes. If you can
create a truly inclusive culture where all employees are encouraged to develop,
interact, and voice their opinions – diversity is inevitable.

Diversity: The individual approach

The individual approach on the other hand, is an approach by which a company

selects minority groups or individuals to participate in the mentoring program. As
a mentoring software provider, our clients often apply mentoring to very specific
diversity initiatives. While this may seem intuitive and resourceful, it is often not
the most effective way to foster diversity. But, it is purposeful and more easily
measured. After all, it is far easier to track the outcomes of a small test group.

My recommendation:

Find a healthy middle-ground. It is unlikely that every individual within your

organisation is going to want to participate in the mentoring program, so offer
the program beyond a select group. This will open up the benefits of mentoring
to more individuals, while creating a more diverse pool of mentors and mentees
who will interact and converse with one another – breaking down the artificial
barriers to diversity organically – and permanently.

Diversity: Top-down

One of the main measures of diversity, including amongst the tech giants like
Google and Facebook, is diversity in the boardroom and C-suite; so mentoring
for diversity up-the-hierarchy has become paramount. What does this look like? It
involves connecting high potential minority employees with management level
employees who can offer them advice, support, and a network with which to
climb the ladder. Again, one of the bonuses of this measure is that it is easy to
measure. It also comes with many trickle down effects which disseminate
throughout an organisation.
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Inclusion: Bottom-up

The inclusion approach includes worrying about diversity and inclusion across all
departments, levels of authority, and experience levels. An inclusive approach
involves plugging all of the leaks in a long talent funnel – from recruitment all the
way to the C-suite. It involves offering mentoring as an onboarding tool to
diverse hires who may need more time and care in being initiated; involves
providing mentoring to junior and mid-level employees who need to continue to
develop leadership and communication skills; and involves mentoring senior
management and leaders.

My recommendation:

Make mentoring an integral part of your culture. This way, you can stop trying to
find temporary solutions to permanent problems. When people and culture
programs are run in perpetuity and with commitment, they become embedded in
the corporation. Then, you will find that the whole organisation becomes more
diverse and inclusive. Upper management and senior leadership will be
burgeoning with diversity, while the rest of the organisation normalises the
process of internal progression based on merit – not appearance.

While assessing and implementing these different ideas and strategies, we must
not lose sight of the goal of diversity and inclusion. Which is not to just increase a
KPI or vanity metric, but to provide a platform with equal opportunity for every
person within an organisation.

And beyond that, the strength and benefits of diversity (which are significant),
stem from the intermixing of diverse backgrounds, opinions and beliefs. Having a
diverse group of people standing in a room doesn’t really make that group
diverse; it makes the room diverse. As has been proven time and time again, the
way to overcome shallow differences and plaguing issues is to find common
pursuits. Creating programs where interaction is not just encouraged but
becomes normal practice, creates a truly sustainable, beneficial, and diverse
culture.

Most people do not want to see anyone sitting on the sidelines – minority or not.
So we need to continue working on fostering work environments that ensure that
no one who could or should be in the game – is left on the sidelines.
33
 How Can Mentoring Help
Employee Retention?

The median number of years an employee stays with their company today is
quickly dropping and fast approaching just 4 years, while 25% of millennials are
planning to leave their job in the next year. Clearly, employee retention is on the
decline.

Firing, hiring, onboarding, training and everything else involved with employee
turnover costs our companies and our economies billions of dollars each year. In
fact, in a study conducted by the Center for American Progress, the cost of losing
an employee can cost anywhere from 16% of salary for hourly employees to 213%
of the salary for a highly trained position.

So what can companies do to better retain good employees who otherwise

wouldn’t have left? One proven strategy: build an effective and inclusive
mentoring program.

How can mentoring help?

Mentoring mitigates a number of elements which result in low employee

retention.

Management issues:

According to studies, about 50% of employees leave their companies to get away
from their bosses while 70% of workplace engagement is a variant of an
employee’s relationship with their boss. What can mentoring do to help? It
provides an employee with another boss – the mentor. 34
An employee mentor provides the mentee with a unique management-protege
relationship which they can lean on and rely on. A mentor acts as a life-manager;
supporting, encouraging and helping an employee through tough moments and
experiences where a poor manager falls short – or maybe just doesn’t have the
time. The more applicable support you can provide employees, the higher your
employee retention will be.

Lack of learning and development:

Another major reason for the dreaded low employee retention is a lack of
learning and development opportunity. One of the major reasons we have such a
fierce job-hopping economy is that young professionals really are trying to
maximise their career learning and time spent in the workplace. They aren’t
satisfied by decent pay or a stable job; they want to be challenged and constantly
learning. In some professional industries, 26% of employees report leaving their
companies because of lack of career development opportunities.

Mentoring is a quick fix. Mentoring can help to address specific workplace

learning, but more importantly, addresses the employee’s need for personal
growth and development. A good mentorship program will involve goal-setting,
resource sharing, and action steps towards growth. All of these things, along with
great career and personal advice, combine to satiate an employee’s need for
ongoing learning and development much more than any course or temporary
program. A good mentor is a lifelong learning tool for every individual.

Lack of feedback:

Another source for low employee retention is a lack of workplace feedback, with
65% of all employees reporting that they would like to receive more feedback.
Mentoring fills this void snuggly. An inherent part of all mentorships is ongoing
communication and honest feedback. Mentor-mentee meetings occur frequently
and involve a mentor sitting down and providing suggestions, feedback, and
insights as to where the mentee (employee) is successful or has work-to-do. While
not always job specific, mentoring supplements job performance reviews
perfectly while occurring frequently enough to keep employees in the feedback
loop.

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Poor culture:

And finally, poor culture is also damning in the plight for higher employee
retention, with employees who give their work culture low marks being nearly
15% more likely to think about a new job than their counterparts. How does a
mentoring program help create a better culture?

Well for one, it brings employees who haven’t found cultural fit off the sidelines
and into the fore – or increases inclusion. Many employees struggle to find a
connection to their employees and place of work because of a lack of
outside-of-work interaction. A mentorship provides a platform for more intimate
and personal relationships with fellow employees. A mentoring program also
works to encourage diversity in gender, ethnicity – and ideas.

In addition, mentoring programs help to disseminate knowledge share

throughout an organisation, improving cross-department and cross-disciplinary
interaction and acknowledgement. The reasons mentoring programs work in
improving company culture – and retention as a result – is that they foster human
interaction and connection.

Where to start?

So by now, you realise how mentoring addresses many of the issues that lead to
employee departures – and see clearly how an effective mentoring program can
help with employee retention. So where do you start?

An easy starting place is a mentoring software solution like Mentorloop. Instead

of playing around with spreadsheets, docs, and signup forms in an attempt to
build a coherent program, turn to a cloud-based mentoring platform to serve as
your program framework, efficient logistics tool for lowering the admin burden –
and platform for a more engaging mentoring experience for your employees (see
the benefits of mentoring software here).

We would also be more than happy to speak with you at any level regarding how
to start or improve your current mentoring program.

36
 Establishing an Effective
Mentoring Program

38 How Mentoring Software Can Help You Start a Mentoring

Program
42 Mentor-Mentee Matching: Here's How It's Done
45 Top 10 tips for running a Successful Mentoring Program
47 The Biggest Mentoring Program Challenges you will face
50 How You Can Increase Mentoring Program Engagement
54 How can I improve my Mentoring Program?
58 Does Mentoring Software Kill the Human Connection?

37
 How Mentoring Software Can Help
You Start a Mentoring Program

Mentoring software isn’t necessarily new. But it has become increasingly

important as mentoring programs become larger, more sophisticated, and more
important to the functioning of a business.

Starting a mentoring program can be overwhelming, with so many moving parts

and so little time. So how does mentoring software help you start a mentoring
program?

‘Recruiting’ mentors and mentees into the program

Getting mentors and mentees into your program can be tricky; how do you
gather the matching/profile data of your employee, students or members? What
are some good survey questions to ask in order to create great matches?

These questions and logistical problems are easily solved with mentoring
software. Mentoring software enables you to send out one simple ‘recruitment
form’. This recruitment form is customisable to your organisations needs i.e you
get to decide what questions you want to ask your participants, and is easily
completed and submitted by mentors and mentees for approval by the
coordinator.

Once submitted by program participants, this form data and full profile lives
inside of the mentoring software platform – and is instantly accessible for
matching.

38
What used to take hours jumping between surveys, emails, and spreadsheets – is
fully integrated in one solution and takes a matter of minutes. The process is also
less frictional for the mentors and mentees, and results in more signups and a
better user experience.

Matching mentors and mentees

Mentoring software takes care of the all-important mentor-mentee matching.

Matching mentees and mentors is often one of the most important aspects of a
mentoring program, and yet it often becomes extremely unscientific and messy
through spreadsheets and email. Mentorloop enables you to easily match
mentors and mentees according to their experience, preferences, and their
program goals.

It also takes the vast majority of the admin burden away from the coordinator,
and makes the process clean, simple, and less manual. You can read about all of
Mentorloop’s features here.

Providing resources and support to program participants

Mentoring is much more action oriented than a once-a-month chat. But most
people don’t know what mentoring should involve, and they don’t know what a
great mentorship looks like. That’s why both mentors and mentees require
ongoing support, advice, and useful tools and resources to get the most out of a
mentoring program.
39
Mentorloop provides mentoring participants with resources and content about
how to be an effective mentor or mentee, while also empowering them to
develop through the provision of goal-setting frameworks and spreadsheets. A
good mentoring program will coach mentors and mentee through the mentoring
process; not leave them to figure it out.

Building a framework for the program

One of the hardest things about implementing a company program is building

the framework and expectations through which people will participate. A good
mentoring software platform like Mentorloop does that all for you.

Mentorloop provides program coordinators with Mentoring agreements and

first-meeting checklists which they can disseminate to program participants.
These resources enable participants to understand the expectations around the
program, and provide a framework for moving forward and staying engaged.

Tracking and reporting on program outcomes

While mentoring is a believed in HR program and proven L&D strategy, it is still

necessary to report on and prove program outcomes. Mentorloop enables
program coordinators to see and chart individual and mentoring relationship
progress. This way, the coordinator can ensure that people are engaged and
getting the most out of mentoring; resulting in better engagement, better
outcomes, and higher ROI.

A mentoring software platform also enables individuals to track their progress,

giving them a history of their tasks, events, goals, and chats – always accessible,
all in one place.

40
It’s software – the possibilities are endless

In addition to all of the core features of mentoring software – which replace the
largely manual methods of yesteryear, software offers solutions that aren’t
possible without technology. For example, one of Mentorloop’s most popular
features is My Match, a feature which allows mentors and mentees to browse,
select, and connect with the mentors and/or mentees of their choice.
Just like their favourite social media channels including Facebook and LinkedIn.

Building a culture of mentoring

A good mentoring software will embed a culture of mentoring in your

organisation. The flexibility and scalability of mentoring software will allow the
program coordinator to quickly expand the mentoring program, and add and
remove program participants with ease.
Because of the admin burden and manual effort required in a traditional
mentoring program, HR leaders often choose to run mentoring programs
exclusively for diversity purposes, or high or low achievers – but mentoring should
and can be accessible to all people within an organisation via mentoring
software.

A purpose built mentoring solution also shows your employees that you are
serious about mentoring, and serious about their development. Mentoring isn’t a
course. It isn’t something that you can run for a few months. In fact, it is a practice
that must be ongoing and expansive.

While using a mentoring software platform doesn’t solve all of your HR issues or
frustrations, it certainly solves the difficulties surrounding starting a mentoring
program.

Don’t be scared away from starting a mentoring program because of the amount
of work involved. Take a look at an affordable cloud-based mentoring software
platform like Mentorloop. It’ll make your life easier – and improve employee and
organisational outcomes.

41
 Mentor-Mentee Matching:
Here Is How It’s Done

Matching employees into mentorships is arguably the most important element of

any mentoring program. Get a match wrong, and the mentorship is destined to
fail from the outset.

The problem with any matching tool or process – whether it be a 3rd party,
‘artificial intelligence’, or the people taking control of connecting themselves – is
that you are never sure how any coming together of two people will turn out until
they have come together (hence why so many friendships, relationships, and
mentorships are less than ideal).

However, while you can’t ever guarantee a successful match, you can guarantee
the best chance at success by using the most effective mentor mentee matching
tool: dedicated mentoring software.

Coordinated software matching

Mentorloop’s smart matching combines the best of the old and the new. The
manual matching efforts of the pre-software days had a great premise, with the
coordinator seeking to match mentors and mentees based on their skills, goals,
level of experience etc. The problem with this method was that it was slow and
messy, with the only option often being spreadsheets and manual pre-matching
surveys.

42
Mentoring software has improved this process in two main areas:

(1) Gathering mentor mentee data and (2) Efficiently and

accurately matching based on these data.

Gathering matching criteria today is as simple as sending out one recruitment

form. This recruitment form can be customised to each organisations needs (e.g a
university might want to match on area of study, whereas a startup accelerator
may want to match based on number of previous startups). Each mentoring
program participant completes this form – and sends it back to the coordinator
for matching.

What type of data do we usually capture as standard for our clients?

● Skills: strategic planning, marketing, negotiation, writing etc.

● Relationship goals: career progression, career plan, new networks etc.
● Work experience: 1-3 years, 10-15 years etc.
● Interests: sports fan, foodie etc.

And now you have the data with which to make productive matches.

Mentorloop’s smart matching maintains the integrity of manual matching, with

much greater efficiency and consistency. The coordinator has the ability to quickly
filter through mentor and mentee data, comparing them for suitability
side-by-side before initiating a match. This kills wasted time, and allows the
coordinator to drill down and accurately match based on a number of criteria.

43
Self-matching via My Match

The other option (a more modern L&D approach) is to allow your program
participants or employees to match themselves. My Match acts like a mentoring
social network, with any and all participants having the power to browse other
mentors and mentees; view their profiles; and request to match with them. Once
a mentor or mentee finds someone suitable and the request is accepted, they
begin communicating via their private portal in the same way that they would if
they were manually matched.

We love My Match, because it fosters greater employee buy-in, and creates a

more consistent and perpetual approach to mentoring. The problem with a lot of
mentoring programs is that they quickly become stale and predictable with an
employee being matched for 6 months – and then matched again etc.

In contrast, My Match allows employees to build out a personal network of

mentors or mentees, creating better outcomes for employees and a more
knowledge share and mentoring oriented culture for the organisation. It’s also
more interesting for the employees from the outset, and creates that additional
layer of engagement and mystery which keeps program participants on side.

You can read more about the features behind coordinated mentor mentee
matching here.

Post-match

Matching employees into their mentorships is only half the battle. Now the battle
turns to keeping employees engaged, and measuring and reporting on
outcomes.

But matching is and always will play a huge role in employee mentoring. And we
are here to help you make the best mentor mentee matches possible – whether
through conscious coordination, or relinquishing control to employees who want
to control their own networks and development.

Want to see a live demo of our matching processes? Easy. Request a demo of the
software here.

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 Top 10 Tips for Running a
Successful Mentoring Program

We have helped a number of great organisations with their mentoring programs,

and wanted to share a few of the tips that have proven to be successful.

Note: If you would prefer to see some real-life examples, take a look here to see
a few examples of the best company mentoring programs – including the
mentoring efforts of Intel and Deloitte.

Onto the TOP 10 tips for running a successful mentoring program:

1. Ensure you have management buy-in

Ask a senior member of staff and/or divisional heads to promote the programs in
company-wide emails are announcements. Management buy-in is the first step –
and absolutely critical in creating employee buy-in.

2. Focus on what success looks like

Define program objectives before the start of the program. If you use
Mentorloop, you can integrate goal-setting into the Mentorloop recruitment form
so you can measure against initial goals and gauge the success of the program.

3. Set expectations early

Inspire mentees to be proactive; they have the most to gain from the experience.

4. Get people excited

Bring awareness to the program launch date of with an event. Even a small event
ensures mentorship is top-of-mind for employees and management, resulting in
better engagement & better outcomes.
45
5. Actively engage participants

Set tasks for mentees to remind them to introduce themselves and schedule their
first meetings. Share checklists to coach them through the process – and show
them what good mentoring looks like.

6. Leverage resources and content

Utilise the resources – including checklists – that we have handcrafted for you.
Visit our resource page to check out some of the content, which you can share
with your program participants.

7. Monitor and manage

Identify participants who have not yet communicated or are lacking engagement,
and find out why. If you are using mentoring software, leverage pulse surveys and
program reports to receive goal-setting and satisfaction updates.

8. Don’t force it

Life happens. If the situation of a mentor or mentee changes (available time,

personal issues etc.), feel free to remove them from the program and re-match
the other user.

9. Drip feed engagement

Ensure program participants are receiving resources and content which

supplement their mentorships. If you use Mentorloop, you can enable content
tracks, which allow supporting materials and content to be automatically piped to
mentees. After the first month, send a check-in email and ‘thanks for partaking’
note.

10. Use us, we are here to help

We are here to be your mentoring software provider and mentoring consultants.

Feel free to reach out to us about anything mentoring related, including how-to’s,
must-do’s, and don’t do’s.

46
 The Biggest Mentoring Program
Challenges You Will Face

Starting and/or running an organisational mentoring program isn’t easy – nor is

running any people program. So what are some of the major mentoring program
challenges that every program coordinator should be aware of before heading
into the mentoring fire? Because your employees, members or students likely
take their time – and their personal development pretty seriously.

Challenge: The dreaded admin burden

One of the major and early challenges anyone running a mentoring program
faces is the heavy admin burden of program coordination. Coordinating a
mentoring program (at a minimum) requires juggling choosing program
participants; gathering their ‘profiles’ for matching; making the matches
themselves; ensuring the right communication channels are in place for mentors
and mentees; supplying mentors and mentees with supplemental content and
resources; and then measuring and reporting on outcomes.

As you can see, this is a lot of stuff. And stuff requires a good deal of
coordination, work, and running around. So be prepared to manage a lot of
moving parts. All while smiling, of course.

Challenge: Generating interest in the program

If you’re running your organisations mentoring program, you might not be a

marketer. But you will have to tackle the challenge of generating demand for the
program. In our experience, demand for mentoring has always outstripped the
supply – and organisations typically don’t have to do too much work in getting
people to sign up.
47
But if you have a large organisation, and the desire to build a mentoring program
of significant scale, you will have to make sure that people are aware of the
program – and explain to them why they should be involved. Don’t be afraid to
pull the marketing team in to create some pretty infographics if need be.

Challenge: Getting those all-important matches right

The key to creating productive and lasting mentorships is to create synergistic

matches. Now, there is no way to get matching 100% right. You are always going
to have a few mentors or mentees who don’t buy into the program properly, or
match a mentoring pair who don’t quite see eye-to-eye, just like in any interaction
between two humans.

So the best thing you can do is use your discretion, gather great matching data
(including experience, skills, desired outcomes and interest), and potential
software to speed the entire process up a little bit.

You could also remove this challenge entirely by letting program participants
choose their own mentor or mentee.

Challenge: Educating mentors and mentees

An equally challenging part of managing a mentoring program is providing

mentors and mentees with the tools and resources they need to develop a
productive relationship. Because organisational mentoring programs are
semi-forced, you don’t know if the mentors have mentored before – nor whether
the mentee has ever been involved in a mentoring relationship.

For this reason, you need to make helpful resources accessible to them in a light
touch kind of way (not bombarding them with a tonne of front-loaded materials
that make the whole thing seem like a hassle). What kind of resources? Simple
ones: first meeting checklists; mentor-mentee expectation agreements;
goal-setting frameworks; and any more specific or supplemental training
materials. You’d be surprised by the impact that a little bit of direction has on
mentorships.

Get a taste for some of our mentoring education pieces >

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Challenge: Keeping mentors and mentees actively engaged

Like anything in life, people are pretty psyched to do extracurricular activities..

initially. But this excitement wanes quickly and before long, you lose your
mentoring program engagement. This is always going to be a challenge, and one
in which you are only partially in control of. However, there are a bunch of things
(and some of them really cool) that you can do to encourage and spur mentor
and mentee engagement. Find out some proven engagement strategies >

Challenge: Measuring and tracking program success

Another plaguing challenge will be tracking and proving the success of your
program – both from an individual standpoint, and from an organisational
standpoint. Unfortunately, unless you do overcome this challenge and track your
program properly, it may not last too long. Executive teams and management
expect to see results in the year 2017 – and expect to be able to measure these
results. Luckily, mentoring software has made this challenge largely redundant by
doing all of the heavy lifting for you. Read more about tracking mentoring
program success >

There are a number of other challenges that may arise, including highly specific
challenges with individuals or individual mentoring pairs. However, if you get the
framework and planning right – you will be on your way to not only mitigating
these core mentoring program challenges, but leaving them in the dust on your
way to mentoring management success.

Have another major or overwhelming challenge you have experienced in

managing a mentoring program? Let us know about it.

49
 How You Can Increase
Mentoring Program Engagement

The person at your organisation in charge of mentoring (hopefully it’s you), be it a

diversity and inclusion lead or HR manager, has to spend a lot of time (especially
if they aren’t using mentoring software) building and managing the mentoring
program. And sometimes a lot of that time isn’t fully appreciated – nor does it
result in the mentoring program engagement the aforementioned party deserves.

And we can all empathise with the fact that there aren’t too many things worse in
life than putting a lot of time and effort into something – only for it to be ignored
or overlooked as a bit of a waste of time.

So is there a chance that you will spend hours/days/weeks preparing a

spectacular mentoring program which your employees won’t be overly engaged
in? Yes there is a chance – because there is always a chance that things won’t
work out.

But fear not. Because there are a number of mentoring tactics which you can
deploy to ensure (as much as humanly possible) that your employees are kept
engaged in your mentoring program – so that you can rest easy knowing that
your time was well spent.

Engagement tactic: Gamification

Ah good old gamification. As much as we all should have the self-discipline and
internal locus of control to do what is best for us – we don’t. We are terrible at
doing what is best for us; particularly if there isn’t immediate gratification. Great
mentoring takes time to develop, and the rewards are incremental. And that’s
where gamification comes in to provide us with enough short term/immediate
gratification to ensure that we stay motivated enough to reach the pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow. 50
Used correctly, gamification is an incredibly handy engagement tool. How can
you gamify your mentoring program?

– Create incentives for engagement i.e an excursion/day out of the office for the
employees who engage with their mentors often (e.g at least twice per month for
a period of 6 months)

– Create a prized mentor for the highest rated mentee in the program i.e the
mentee who best achieves their initial mentoring goals gets to be mentored by
the CEO for the next 3 months.

The gamification opportunities are essentially endless. Just make sure the
rewards and rewarded actions align with your program goals and don’t take away
from the mentoring relationships. The reward should encourage the positive
activity and engagement in a way such that the employees eventually see
mentoring as the reward and no longer need the ‘carrots’ of gamification.

Engagement tactic: Manager buy-in

The easiest way to ensure employees get engaged with your mentoring program
in the first place (which is requisite for keeping them engaged) is to have upper
management advocate for and back the program. While all employees should
assume that each and every workplace program is important, they are using
heuristics (mental shortcuts) just like the rest of us to arrive at conclusions as to
how important this program is to them and their careers right now.

Having the CEO or a very senior level staff member speak to how important this
program is to them – and how important mentoring has been to their own career,
is a quick and easy way to ensure your employees understand that the program
needs to be taken seriously.

51
Engagement tactic: Show your employees the benefits

Your organisation (and every other organisation) relies on proof of success in the
form of case studies, client stories, and referrals to make smart decisions about
our vendors, recruits etc. And yet we often forget to do this for internal practices.
Would you buy a car or go to an expensive restaurant in the year 2017 without
checking some reviews or asking a friend. Probably not. And you shouldn’t
expect your employees to donate their time and effort to a program which they
don’t know the value of – yet.

Create a few case studies and success stories of previous mentorships that really
affected an employee, or resulted in a promotion or particularly useful skill
development. Have previous mentors and mentee speak about their great
experience and new-found relationships. If you don’t voice the benefits of
mentoring – and show some proof of the results – then your employees probably
won’t ever understand the benefits of getting engaged with the program.

Engagement tactic: Self-matching

Humans are funny creatures. There are a number of psychological traits that we
all exhibit and adhere to – and they are often centered around appearing
consistent and avoiding cognitive dissonance. You can leverage this against your
employees (in a good way) by letting them choose their own mentor or mentee.
When employees do this, they subconsciously commit to the mentoring
relationship more than they would if you matched them.

When we make a decision ourselves, we suffer from commitment bias, whereby

we are more likely to stick with what we have said we will do in the past. This
commitment trigger is never pulled if employees are placed into mentorships by
a third party or ‘coordinator’.

If you want to explore self-matching as an option – we have a feature called My

Match which makes this possible – and enjoyable. Check it out here.

52
Engagement tactic: Drip-feed content and resources

Your mentoring program shouldn’t go cold after launch. In fact, the program
should be intermittently filled with helpful content and resources which push your
employees in the right direction and notify them of expectations and best
practices. Maybe your mentors don’t know how to help mentees set goals;
maybe your mentees don’t know how to approach their first meeting with their
mentor. These moments and voids in knowledge and understanding give you an
opportunity to step in, guide them, add value to the mentoring experience – and
keep all employees happy and engaged.

The Mentorloop platform facilitates the automated sharing of content and

resources in-app or via email. Read a bit more about it here.

The point of these engagement tactics is to persuade stubborn and

change-averse humans into doing something that is highly advantageous for
them but often hard to stay engaged with; much like exercising, goal-setting, and
studying are good practices which we would all love to do more of but struggle
to find the motivation or ‘triggers’.

Leveraging some of these tactics is a great way to increase your chances of

getting a greater return on the time you invest in facilitating your mentoring
program – and a great way to ensure your employees stay engaged with your
mentoring program and create positive habits and effective mentorships that they
will be very grateful for.

If you are interested in learning how mentoring software can help your employees
stay engaged with the program – including through facilitating many of the above
elements – request a software demo right here.

53
 How Can I Improve My Mentoring
Program with mentoring
software?

There are two camps in the market for mentoring software:

(1) Organisations who are looking to start a mentoring program

(2) Organisations who are looking to improve their current mentoring program

Today, I am interested in answering the question posed by audience (2): How can
I improve my mentoring program with mentoring software?

And here are a few of the answers..

Reduced admin:

If you are running your mentoring program without mentoring software, then it is
probably inefficient and full of admin tasks including creating internal documents
to inform people of the program; matching your mentors and mentees via
spreadsheets; communicating all of this via email; and then attempting to report
on program and individual outcomes. This is a heavy burden on the person
running the program.

When you use a cloud-based mentoring platform, these tasks are made simple.
You can disseminate one form to garner interest and create mentor/mentee
profiles; easily match employees based on profile elements such as skills, goals,
or any other custom field; communicate with all participants via the platform –
and then sit back and relax as analytics and custom reports funnel through your
monitor. All of this happens online in one spot. No spreadsheets – and no emails.
54
The resulting scalability

The real result of this is that it makes your mentoring program more scalable.
Doing it ‘the old way’, it would have been near-impossible to offer mentoring to
100, 200, or 500 people. With mentoring software, you can literally offer it to as
many employees as you want with little to no increase in admin burden. This
means more mentoring – and more benefit.

Resources and content tracks

An online platform also serves as a portal for providing mentors and mentees
with resources and content which supplement and enhance their mentoring
experience. These resources can be piped through the platform, be accessed on
the platform, or sent via email. Some requisite and effective resources include
goal-setting frameworks and spreadsheets, meeting checklists, and advice about
how to be a great mentee or mentor – and you also have the freedom to send
your own handcrafted or curated resources.

Technology/Features

Mentorloop also comes with modern features that completely re-shape the
potential of your program. Features like My Match enable your employees to
browse, select and connect with the mentee/s or mentor/s who best suit their
needs. The software serves as a platform for housing all of your employees and
their profiles – ready to be searched and leveraged for great mentorships. These
features drastically improve program engagement and the opportunity to create
a perpetual culture of mentoring. In a big company, this opens up a plethora of
new previously impossible connections and empowers individuals to take control
of their own mentoring experience.
55
Tracking, measuring, and reporting

Mentoring software also makes measuring the success of the program possible,
which is a pain point and frequently voiced frustration of mentoring programs.
Mentorloop keeps track of the frequency of communication between mentors
and mentees, while also serving as a tool for garnering program feedback
through surveys and support. This makes it possible to preempt any negative
experiences, make changes, as well as expand or adjust the program based on
data.

Consistency

And finally, one of the major and often unforeseen ways that mentoring software
improves a mentoring program is by making inputs – and therefore outcomes –
more consistent. It allows the coordinator to create smarter matches every time,
ensure that every mentorship is supported by resources and content, and makes
it possible and easy to manage an ongoing mentoring program without the
hassle of coordination.

And the end result of all these enhancements is better outcomes for you, your
employees, and your organisation. They mean less painful admin work for the
coordinators – and a more engaging and fruitful experience for the employees.

There are countless ways that you can improve a mentoring program, but what is
most important is putting the infrastructure in place to support and supplement
the human interaction of a great mentoring relationship. And mentoring software
serves as that infrastructure.

If you are interested in finding out if Mentorloop can help you improve your
mentoring program – request some time with one of us here. 56
Imagine a world where building a mentoring program was as
easy as start, match, measure...

This world exists. Ditch the spreadsheets and emails for purpose built, intuitive
mentoring software.

Mentoring software helps you onboard people into your program, helps you
match your mentors and mentees, enables mentors and mentees to communicate
and track progress effectively, and enables you to accurately measure and report
on mentoring success.

That’s a lot of work off your plate, and a guarantee of more mentoring success.

See a demo of the software now to see how it works - and see why great
organisations like the BBC choose Mentorloop to run their mentoring programs.

Get a free demo of mentoring software

57
 Does Mentoring Software Kill
the Human Connection?

Something we sometimes hear from mentoring traditionalists and evangelists is

that mentoring software can kill the human element of a mentoring relationship –
the part that makes it special.

As mentoring purists and evangelists ourselves, this pains us. So I am here to tell
you that mentoring software will not kill what is special about mentoring. In fact, it
will actually make the human element more important – and more possible –
empowering the people who wouldn’t be able to have any sort of mentoring
relationship to have one, while allowing for and enabling any and all forms of
communication for everyone else.

Change is hard

The notion that a new technology will ‘kill’ something more traditional is the
human reaction to change. The rise of the mobile phone and texting led many to
believe that great content and great writing would slowly cease to exist as more
and more people changed their communication and content consumption habits.
The exact opposite is true. The mobile phone made it possible for more people
to consume written content and more people to share and spread content;
increasing the demand for great content/writing; inspiring and incentivising more
people to write.

And today, we have more blogs, articles, and great writers than we ever have
before.
58
Just as with content production, new mentoring technology will only serve to
increase the demand for mentoring; increasing the supply of mentors; and
increasing the quality of mentoring overall.

Change is hard. But change is necessary.

Human interaction lives on..

New technologies like mobile phones and email have not replaced human
interaction. They have supplemented it.

Mentoring software as a communication channel is not ‘replacing’ the channel of

in-person meetings and interaction. It is supplementing it.

Instead of waiting one month to catch up with your mentee or mentor because of
conflicting schedules and inherent geographical barriers, you can fill the month
void by speaking with them via a purpose-build communication channel once a
week – and then catching up in person. Instead of playing around with 3 or 4
types of different communication channels (email, text, call, Skype), you can
contact, log, and keep tabs on your entire communication track within one portal.

In fact, having a steady stream of solid communication via mentoring software

makes in-person contact more important by creating a deeper need and desire to
meet in person.

Dating technology didn’t remove the human element of dating. It bolstered it by

creating more connections, more matches, more dialogue, more dates – and
more in-person relationships.

59
Democratisation

The most important thing that mentoring software does for people is open up the
possibility and opportunity for mentoring interaction. Mentoring software is
enabling more people to get involved in mentoring in the first place.

Even if mentoring software reduces in-person interaction by 10 or 20%, which we

haven’t seen happen, imagine how much in-person mentoring is growing in
absolute terms if we have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions more
people engaged in mentoring as a practice.

And technology doesn’t force you to change how you interact with your world.
Your mentoring relationship is exactly what you make it; just as you can choose to
date online or to meet people in the ‘real-world’.

You can have a mentoring relationship filled solely with in-person contact; or you
can have an entirely virtual mentoring relationship. And that is what makes
mentoring technology great – it allows for all forms of communication.

Mentoring software will not spell the end of the traditional mentoring relationship
nor the end of face-to-face mentoring interaction. It will enable more of it.

And more access to good things is always a good thing.

You can read more ‘about us’ and why we think mentoring software is important
here.
60
 Developing a Mentor Relationship

62 How Long Should Mentorship Last?

65 What’s In It For the Mentor

67 What’s Your Mentoring Style?

61
 How long should Mentorship last?

This question is pretty central to any mentoring program: how long should
mentorship actually last?

And while there is no definitive answer (it’s kind of a how long is a piece of string),
and while many mentorships often last indefinitely, there are some timeframes
and best practices which make a lot of sense when seeking to run a mentoring
program and establish some semblance of structure and cadence.

It’s also best to look at a mentorship as a journey with four distinct stages, stages
which come with relatively predictable timeframes.

*note: these phases are semi-dependant on how often the mentor and
mentee meet; they makes the most sense for a meeting/interaction
cadence of between once and twice per month.

Phase 1: Foundation (1-2 months)

The foundation phase of the mentorship is all about creating a foundation for a
good relationship. It’s about setting early expectations (such as how often you will
communicate and through what channels), and creating goals and objectives for
the next stage of the mentorship.

Success in the foundation stage requires strong input and activity from both the
mentor and mentee to establish a great connection and create a framework so
that future interactions are fruitful.
62
Phase 2: Progress (2-5 months)

Phase two is where a lot of the action takes place. It is during this pivotal phase
that the mentee begins to pursue the goals and objectives set in the foundation
stage.

This is the stage where the mentee becomes the catalyst of success – working
hard to create action – which enables reaction from the mentor. If the mentee is
stagnant during this period, the mentor will have trouble engaging and providing
any real value.

Phase 3: Analysis and Revision (5-9 months)

Phase three is the phase at which mentoring really becomes mentoring. It is the
phase whereby the mentor can start to impasse their wisdom and experience on
to the mentees behaviours and outcomes. It is also the period of the mentorship
where the mentee and mentor can work together to revise the goals and
objectives of the mentorship – and work together to create working plans for the
months and years ahead.

During this stage, the mentor becomes more responsible for a healthy
mentorship. If the mentee is actively pursuing their activity and seeking feedback,
the mentor should work hard to stay aligned with progress and provide really
valuable feedback and analysis.

Phase 4: Dormancy (9+ months)

The reason phase 4 is called dormancy and not death or decline is that every
mentorship will naturally taper off over time – but not end. Each mentor only has
so much experience and advice to offer, limited bandwidth, and a certain domain
expertise.

But all good mentorships result in a relationship which can be renewed and
leaned on at any point in time. In the same way that the mentee progress and
accumulates new experiences, so does the mentor. Mentees will likely find that
their great mentors can offer new insights as they become executives, business
owners, and even more well travelled.

63
The 9-12 month mark is typically a great time to set the mentorship on the
back-burner, and seek mentorship and guidance from someone who can work
with you on progressing from the new plateau or challenges you have now
reached.

It’s important to note that none of these phases are mutually exclusive (more than
one can be occurring at any one point in time e.g making progress and analysing
these progress simultaneously).

It is also important to note that there is absolutely no reason that an individual

cannot be engaged in a number of different phases with a number of different
mentors.

At Mentorloop, we like to think of mentors as a board of personal advisors.

Just as a company has a board who oversee the operations, outcomes, and
accountability of an organisation – a personal advisory board can do this for an
individual to great effect.

Ideally, every individual will be constantly building out their early phase
mentorships, while maintaining a number of strong connections with previous
mentors who they can turn to when desired.

When running a mentoring program at your organisation, seek to create

mentoring relationships which last at last 9 months (up to the analysis phase),
after which people naturally enter the maintenance phase.

To get even more out of your mentoring program, initiate new matches for every
individual after 9 or so months so that each individual is expanding their network
and expanding their opportunities for growth indefinitely.

Running a perpetual mentoring program in this way, and creating a true culture of
mentorship (without any of the effort) can be easily achieved through the use of
mentoring software features like My Match, which enable individuals to browse
and connect with a new mentor at any point in time – resulting in incredible
outcomes for individuals and organisations.

64
 What’s In It For the Mentor?

Mentoring is a universally valued yet often underutilized aspect of business –

much to the detriment of many businesses. Incredibly, 70% of small businesses
that receive mentoring survive more than five years – double the survival rate of
non-mentored businesses.

We wanted to dive a little deeper into the reasons behind why successful
business owners and founders choose to mentor long after they need the
experience. We wanted to answer the question that is often posed to us: What’s
in it for the mentor?

So we set about interviewing 18 mentors from Startmate, one of Australia’s

leading and most successful accelerator programs. One of Startmate’s strongest
weapons is its arsenal of great mentors; mentors from hugely successful
Australian startups and companies that provide each new startup cohort with bit
of cash and a bucketload of experience and advice.

What did they say was the trigger behind becoming a mentor?

69% of interviewees said their trigger was an internal one, and that their main
motivation for becoming a mentor was to give back or pay-it-forward. These
people cited their previous experience of being mentored as an inspiration to get
involved – while many were looking to help others avoid the costly mistakes they
themselves had made.

Other respondents voiced less altruistic motives including access to the mentor
network, while 18% simply did it because someone asked (all the more reason to
65
ask, people).
What in it for you? We asked..

50% of the mentors said that simply enjoying the mentoring experience was their
‘what’s in it for me’. These mentors get a kick out of giving back and seeing their
advice and suggestions helping other people move forward.

While 43% of respondents have continued to find that mentoring helps them
learn, grow, garner new insights, and stay sharp; a number which highlights that
even individuals well and truly on their way along the success path can gain a lot
from opening themselves up to new and perhaps less formal channels of learning.

Others have found that mentoring provides them with valuable real-life case
studies and a consistent flow of great new founders and valuable connections.

And what were a few of the most rewarding experiences that

these mentors have had over the years?

Most centred on seeing founders and their companies grow, prosper and tackle
previously insurmountable obstacles, but the most indicative response –
especially in the startup space was this one, “The most rewarding part of
mentoring is finding an insight that was missed by a founder and watching them
light up at the new possibilities. Either a problem solved, or an opportunity
discovered. Shoulders move back, head lifts, eyes widen. Seeing the lightbulb
moment in front of you.”

While mentoring is often viewed as a one way street where the mentor sacrifices
their time in order to help someone else, it appears that the age old practice of
mentoring may continue to grow and thrive because there is so much value on
both sides of the relationship.

Whether you become a mentor because you want to give back, learn and tap into
a great network, or just because you are asked – becoming a mentor is almost
guaranteed to be a very rich and enlightening experience for you – as well as the
mentee.

If you are interest in getting that warm-fuzzy-mentor feeling, tell someone at your
organisation about us and we will do what we can to help you out.

66
 What’s Your Mentoring Style?

We built a mentoring software platform because we know that having a great

mentor can change your life. In spending time with a number of different mentor
programs, mentors, and mentees, it has become very apparent that just like in
every facet of life – there are plenty of different mentor styles.

So we wanted to cover a few of the mentoring styles that we have come across in
our time. None objectively better than any others, some a little more egotistical,
and all with their own tinge of awesomeness.

The Inspiration

Loved by all except guys on the other ‘team’, the inspiration is the poster child of
mentoring. The inspirational mentor is laconic. He or she is the Spartan of
mentoring. They walk into every mentoring meeting looking to shift the
paradigm, and re-shape their mentees view of the world. Bold speeches and
swords ablaze, the inspirational mentor is not afraid to stand up and give a
roaring speech, nor tell the mentee what is at stake here. The inspiration leads by
using beautiful language and analogies to convey a message of pure inspiration.

Pros: Memorable, quotable, action oriented

Cons: Sometimes gets carried away, speeches can be long, dreams may be too
big for some

67
The Hardman/Hardwoman

Loved by many, loathed by some – they are the hard task master of mentoring.
From day one, they set strict parameters, high goals, and key milestones. They
remind their mentees of a drill sergeant; a drill sergeant who lives and dies
through self-development and potential, and will stop at nothing to ensure that
the mentee becomes the best version of themselves. The hardman or hardwoman
sees strength when the mentee sees weakness. Opportunity when the mentee
sees fear. While the road with the hardman/hardwoman can be tough, it is almost
always extremely productive – and gratifying when you come out alive.

Pros: Creates great habits and good discipline, gets the job done

Cons: Can be disconcerting at times, can inspire feelings of inadequacy and fear

The Encourager/The Coach

Loved by all with a pulse, the encourager is the mentor we all kind of hope for.
The encourager looks to encourage. They look to break down barriers and
produce progress by ensuring that the mentee knows that they ‘can do it’. No
goal is too high, no obstacle big enough to overcome. If the encourager can
encourage it, then it can be done. While being a mentee to the encourager can
be a blessing, it can also allow a mentee to coast and take the proverbial mile –
resulting in very little progress and a lot of procrastination.

Pros: Great experience, friend for life, works extremely well with a hardworker
who needs to overcome self-doubt

Cons: Lack of accountability, can ‘get away’ with not doing stuff, doesn’t work
well with the lazy guy or gal

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The Enigma

Many of us have enigma friends; that guy or gal who is sometimes there,
sometimes not, and who takes around the world trips without telling a soul. Well,
there are enigmatic mentors too. They are sometimes there for their mentees,
sometimes not. They often have great advice, and sometimes don’t. But what you
can always expect is the unexpected. Life with the enigma can be tough, but it
can also be spectacular.

Pros: Unpredictable

Cons: Unpredictable

This is by no means an exhaustive list – nor is it meant to imply that one style is
better than any others. In fact, the key to having a great mentorship, just like any
human relationship, is to have a great dynamic with and compliment your
mentor’s style.

Every mentorship and every mentor is different. And they all have something
unique and novel to add to your life.

If you have experienced a mentor with a different or completely unique style –

don’t hesitate to tell us what they were like. We would be happy to amend the
list.

69
 Measuring the Success of
a Mentoring Program

71 Simple Ways to Track Mentoring Program Success

75 4 Mentoring Program KPI’s You Should be Tracking

70
 Simple Ways to Track
Mentoring Program Success

You built a truly effective mentoring program with seamless program onboarding;
ideal matches; and awesome supporting content and resources. Perfect right?

But what do you do when your boss asks you to show you how successful the
mentoring program is or was? Bummer right?

This is the unfortunate reality for many program coordinators, who often start and
run their mentoring programs in a bit of a vacuum. But fortunately, this doesn’t
need to be the case. Because today, mentoring programs are genuinely
measurable.

Today, you can quite easily gather and compile the data, analytics, and reports to
reinforce your gut instincts and anecdotal evidence surrounding your mentoring
program. Meaning that you can walk into your bosses office with your chest
puffed out and a bunch of impressive data to support your mentoring efforts.

TRACKING MENTORING PROGRAM SUCCESS

There are a few of ways to track your mentoring program’s success, starting with:

Mentoring engagement

Engagement with any program is typically a pretty good way of gauging success.
If you create a large event and no one shows up, it will probably be perceived as
a failure. If you create a mentoring program and there isn’t much/any
mentor-mentee interaction, then your mentoring program wasn’t a success. In
saying this, ‘engagement’ is somewhat subjective, which is why we encourage
mentor and mentees to set their own expectations early in the program. If two
very busy professionals schedule to meet once a month – and do so – that’s great
71
engagement.
Measuring this engagement can be done in a few ways. You can track actual
communications including messages, tasks set, and events created (in-real time
and retroactively) with a mentoring software solution like Mentorloop, or have the
mentors note down in-person meetings or frequency of communication manually
– to be tallied and tabulated later on. A mentoring software platform is obviously
ideal here as it can track every mentoring program engagement – and formulate
it in digestible information.

Individual goals

Goal tracking is a great way to measure program success because it is output

oriented. And at the end of the day, the true measure of success is whether or
not the mentees (and potentially the mentors) progress in some tangible way.
Tracking against goals is pretty simple because goals are initially set – and then
either achieved or not. Pretty black and white.

This means that as long as you do an initial survey of program participants, and
they set goals effectively, you can measure against them as many times as you
want during the program to track goal attainment – and therefore personal (and
program) success.

Organisational goals

Similarly, you can create macro goals for your organisation. This involves a little
more coordination and a deeper dive into the data, but is extremely valuable in
validating your mentoring efforts; especially to the executive team or board. For
example, you may set an organisational goal for your mentoring program to
increase diversity at the management level; or to increase succession planning
(leadership development); or to increase employee retention.

As long as you have accurate statistics/data on the pre-mentoring state of these

areas, you can easily see whether progress was made. While not perfectly
scientific (it’s difficult to control for other variables in the workplace), you can
trace specific mentoring outcomes by then more closely exploring why retention
has increased (was it due to mentoring?).

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Employee satisfaction

An often overlooked and very simple way to track the success of any workplace
program (including mentoring) is to simply ask your employees what they think.
To ask them how satisfied they are with the program. If your employees are
satisfied with the mentoring program, you can quite confidently assume that it
there will be a number of positive outcomes. This is also extremely valuable data
i.e 95% of our employees are satisfied with our current mentoring program.

REPORTING ON MENTORING PROGRAM SUCCESS

Data and insight alone are not enough; you also need to be able to
compartmentalise the data and outcomes in a way that is digestible for other
people (so you can put it on your bosses desk). So if this are the outcomes we are
seeking to track and measure – what are the outputs of the data?

Analytics

Analytics requires technology. If you want to gather detailed program analytics

including full engagement data and activity, then you will need to use a software
platform. The benefits of having access to this data – and all of the
exporting/reporting options accompanying them is obvious: it removes the need
for manual and admin heavy efforts. If you would like to be able to track
mentoring program analytics – check out our software features here.

Surveys

Surveys can fill in the more qualitative gaps that analytics fail to arouse. Having
good or bad engagement analytics may tell you a large story – but they don’t tell
you the full story. The full story requires asking people how they are doing; how
satisfied they are; and how the program could be better. And the best tool for
this is the survey. Mentoring software platforms integrate surveying into the
platform so that it’s less frictional for users and more contextual; or you can build
your own surveys, send the survey to mentors and mentees, and then organise
your results.

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Reports

There aren’t many things in life better than organised and coherent data. The
best way to showcase your mentoring program efforts – and your new program
tracking capabilities – is with a nice clean (and sexy) report. There are a number of
ways to build great reports. You can use your manually collected data to
assemble reports yourself, or export and download accurate software derived
insights from your mentoring software platform.

TRACKING MENTORING PROGRAM SUCCESS

There really is no excuse for NOT tracking your mentoring programs outcomes
and success. You really our spoilt for choice when it comes to options for proving
the success of your mentoring program. In the year 2017, you can quite
comfortably report on program engagement, employee satisfaction, employee
development, and organisational goal attainment without breaking a sweat.

So next time your boss asks you why you’re running that mentoring program, or
how successful your mentoring program is or was – turn to your analytics, surveys,
and/or reports – and prove it with data.

If you are interested in seeing how Mentorloop can help you track your program
success, get a live demo with one of our mentoring specialists right here.

Or read about how mentoring software can help you start a mentoring program
here. Happy tracking.
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 4 Mentoring Program KPI’s
you should be tracking

Mentoring is one those employee programs that is generally considered good,

even when the objective results aren’t 100% clear.

However, organisations are often (and rightly so) concerned with tracking more
tangible outcomes – and assessing the ROI of their mentoring programs.

If you are in this camp, and are looking to track mentoring success more closely,
what exactly should mentoring program KPI’s look like?

And how can you accurately measure these KPI’s?

KPI: Mentoring program satisfaction

It is important to quantify employee satisfaction for any program. All too often,
organisations build checklist programs (check the box because it’s the right thing
to do) without ever really assessing whether or not their employees are
enjoying/happy with the program.

This KPI is critical to success – because if this KPI isn’t achieved, then the next few
will be impossible.

How do you measure it?

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One of the best ways to measure satisfaction is to measure engagement and
communication frequency between mentor and mentees, which mentoring
software platforms like Mentorloop make very simple. Mentorloop captures all
communication (frequency not the content of the message) between mentors and
mentees within the platform and via email, and sends that data to your
dashboard for reference and reporting.

In addition, simply ask your employees whether or not they are satisfied, and how
the program can be improved with a couple of pulse surveys or post-program
interviews.

KPI: Employee engagement & retention

One of the proven outcomes of a great mentoring program is improved

employee engagement and retention – which means it should be one of your
KPI’s. Increasing engagement and retention are a high priority amongst all
organisations; drastically reducing turnover and hiring costs, and increasing
productivity.

How do you measure it?

This one can be a little more difficult, but is doable (here is a great article on
employee engagement and how to measure it).

Once again, you can employ the survey method of discovery, simply asking your
employees to fill out regular pulse surveys; conduct one-on-ones; conduct
stay/exit interviews; and gather employee NPS scores.

The key here in terms of your mentoring program KPI’s, is to make sure you have
a baseline measurement pre-program – and measure against that baseline for
progress during or after the program – where you can confidently derive that the
program had an impact.

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KPI: Employee learning and development

Learning and development is another standard KPI for mentoring programs.

Mentoring programs are great for developing soft skills such as leadership
development, communication skills, and confidence, but are also great for
improving domain learning when a mentee is partnered with a mentor who can
provide their expertise and actionable tactics.

How do you measure it?

Goals are a great (and under-utilised) method of measuring personal and

professional development. Integrating goals and intended outcomes into your
mentoring program recruiting/onboarding form gives you an easy way to
measure your L&D KPI.

To do this, simply ask your mentors and mentees what they would like to get out
of the program (whether that be improved networks, leadership, or something
Download the proven Mentorloop goal-setting framework
specific like website development), and then assess their progress against these 5
metrics.

KPI: Diversity and inclusion

Mentoring programs are becoming an increasingly important diversity and

inclusion initiative as they encourage the type of activity and support which
results in better D&I outcomes.

More young female professionals are being paired with successful men and
women in senior roles who can support them, offer them advice, and sponsor
them to success; other minority groups are feeling more acknowledged, and
deriving the confidence and leadership skills to break through the artificial
ceilings.

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How do you measure it?

The most common methods of assessing diversity are measuring the

representation of underrepresented groups at various levels of an organisation
e.g upper management.

You can get a good look at this KPI by doing a pre and post-mentoring program
assessment of these statistics. Promotions and large-scale hiring don’t happen
overnight, so it may take a couple of cohorts to see tangible results.

Personally, I don’t think this measure does enough in describing the results, nor
prescribing real solutions for plaguing inclusion problems – and think we can do
a better job at creating a more holistic look at D&I with measures like these.

While not an exhaustive list of mentoring KPI’s, if you stay true to these 4
mentoring program KPI’s that you should be measuring, you can’t go too far
wrong.

If you have a highly specialised mentoring cohort (say you are an engineering
heavy company), you may want to get more granular with your mentoring
program KPI’s, and make them more skill specific.

Good luck in achieving those key performance indicators.

Want some help tracking and achieving these mentoring

program KPI’s?

Chat with a mentoring specialist now

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Made with love by Mentorloop.

Visit us:
mentorloop.com

Contact us:
info@mentorloop.com

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