Organisations should be offering mentoring to every employee. There are several, often overlooked, benefits to mentoring programmes which organisations should really consider
Mentoring has long been considered a fantastic way for companies and organisations to improve employee learning and development. That said, there are still a significant number of organisations that I come across every week who are not currently offering mentoring schemes to all employees. Some organisations have a top-level mentoring agenda which simply fails to engage with employees, others have mentoring programmes reserved for senior professionals only.
The first and often most important reason that organisations should be offering mentoring is the significant impact it can have upon employee engagement, and ultimately employee ROI (Return on Investment). Employee engagement is low. It has been for a long time and some surveys, such as the Gallup Workforce Survey, suggest that employee engagement levels are at just 12-15%.
Mentoring has been shown to have a real impact on increasing employee engagement. With HR directors constantly looking at ways in which organisations can increase engagement levels, mentoring is a sure-fire, easy way to effectively improve this. By providing employees with a mentoring programme and mentorship support, it will help them to immediately feel valued and given additional support they should have.
On the flip side, when encouraging employees to become mentors to others, you immediately add value and responsibility to said employees. Mentors can get just as much out of mentoring as mentees. As musician Phil Collins once said, “in learning we teach, and in teaching we learn”. You will be amazed what your mentors learn by mentoring less experienced individuals. Reverse mentoring can come into play here too. When less experienced and newer employees offer mentoring for more senior and experienced employees (reverse mentoring) you can unlock even more opportunities for business and organisational growth.
Another consideration when looking at setting up a mentoring programme is that mentoring can significantly reduce employee turnover. There are a few reasons for this happy correlation. Primarily, it is thought that because mentoring, as referenced above, it increases employee engagement and therefore satisfaction.
However, another thing to consider is that around 50% of employees leave their role due to management issues. By offering employees with mentors, you can counteract this by offering them with another channel of support and communication. There are always going to be challenged with managers and friction is inevitable, even with the greatest companies and organisations. However, putting in mentors to offer support in dealing with workplace challenges – such as management challenges, is extremely powerful.
Further to employee retention and satisfaction, there are a few other reasons why it is vitally important for organisations to encourage mentoring. Every year, millions of pounds is spent on training and development, by large organisations. This training is often provided externally and can quite frequently be an unnecessary additional cost, where existing internal knowledge already exists.
By encouraging mentoring, you will instantly open additional knowledge sharing channels. Now, we aren’t saying external coaching and training is not important- it very much is! However, there will almost certainly be cases where it is unnecessary and could easily be replaced with mentoring.
Now, you might be thinking that offering mentoring programmes sounds great, but it all takes additional time, resources and management. Fortunately, programmes and technologies like PushFar are out there to help make mentor matching, management and reporting simple, secure and effective.
So, if you are looking for ways to help increase employee engagement, retention, upskilling and overall communication within an organisation, then you might want to look at your mentoring programmes. Offering mentoring could be a very simple quick-win, to benefit everyone!
