How to Engage Employees to Mentoring Programs

How to Engage Employees in Mentoring Program
A well-designed mentoring program has the potential of building stronger relationships within mentor and mentees, and give employees a career roadmap along with the right knowledge to grow. Despite the significance of these programs, some organizations struggle to attract employees and engage them.

Are you struggling with employee engagement? Don’t worry! Follow these tips to boost engagement:

Structure the Mentoring Program

The structure is like a skeleton. It acts as the foundation of the program. It describes how will the teams move forward and what roadmap will they follow. Create a one-pager pdf or a brochure that can share in intranet, social channels and communities.

Design a Program Guideline

Start with the basics. Create a guideline and a structure on the mentoring program. This should define the purpose and objective of the program. When you document everything and there’s a proper structure to follow, everyone will be on the same page.

While setting the goals, make sure they are smart:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-based

When you set goals for the mentorship program by following these criteria, this will help your team measure the goals.  

Are you targeting leadership development? Is it talent and skill-based development? Are you trying to change to a positive employee culture? Do you want to support your D&I targets with mentoring?

You can check out the example mentoring program use-cases that you want to apply.

Communicate in Multiple Channels

Communication is the key to success. The mentors must be available via multiple channels for communication. The mentees must be aware of when and how they can reach out to their mentors. Make it a friendly collaboration so that nobody feels they are distributing someone with their queries and concerns.

Involve the Leaders or Influencers

To make the mentoring program attractive for employees, involve the leaders or influencers like the CEOs. When an authority figure endorses a program, it creates an impact. If it’s possible to organize a training or coaching session led by the CEO or VPs of certain departments in the training as well. This would add more value to the program.

Who wouldn’t like to be mentored by the leaders, get all the insights about the industry, find out which are the top soft skills and corporate skills they need to learn for career development.

Set Clear Expectations

To engage employees in the mentorship program at hand, start by setting the expectations straight. This doesn’t include the expectations of the mentees but also the mentors.

Here are some of the common expectations about mentoring:

• Keep the commitments made
• Maintain confidentiality between the mentor and mentee.
• Keep on evaluating the relationship at various points throughout the agreed time-frame.

Use Mentoring Software

Once the mentees and mentors are in a relationship, there will be moments where both will need support on how to progress and go about their relationship. Here, a mentoring software comes into play. It’s a resource the entire organization can get benefit from. It will act as a place for keeping track of the program, getting feedback from the mentors and mentees which will continue to improve the program and measure success.

The mentor and mentee relationship will focus on learning goals and the software will help in staying focused. At the end of the day, the mentoring software will generate reports demonstrating the KPIs of the mentorship program.

Bottom Line

Engaging employees is hard but it’s not impossible. It would take a little work from the organization’s side but it’s worth it because, in the end, the more engaged your mentors and mentees are, the higher the chances of achieving goals.