Measuring success of your mentoring program really starts with an understanding of what you hope to accomplish in the short term and the long term by offering a mentoring program to your participants. Long term metrics for a mentoring program may include retention, promotability, and an increase in employee engagement scores. It is also important to track the perceived success of the program in the short term, which may include feedback surveys and collecting an NPS (net promoter score) from participants in your mentoring program.
At Engage Mentoring, we make it easy for our clients by tracking the success of our programs in a variety of ways. Our mentoring software is able to automatically show how many hours of mentoring took place, the topics selected, how participants felt about the quality of the program and how they were able to move the needle in the skill areas that they identified. We also track the NPS score from the participants and feedback from the participants to the mentor and to the mentee.
For the mentors, we actually have data that shows there’s arguably no better way to teach someone how to be an effective leader than by teaching them how to mentor. We hear from mentors who say they actually learn more by serving as a mentor than by serving as a mentee.
Because of this, we tend to approach mentors in our programs not as a volunteer opportunity, but really as an opportunity for them to develop their leadership capacity and learn an important new skill.
A formalized mentoring program at a company can help address the following: efficient skill development, succession planning, talent retention, talent attraction, leadership development, breaking down silos in communication, and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in the workplace. So the byproduct of implementation of a formalized mentoring program for an organization is often increased retention, increased productivity, and a stronger value proposition for why an employee would want to come work for you.
So many employers are only investing in executive coaching for their executives and they might be investing in leadership development for a select audience of employees, but to really transform an organization and to really move the needle in terms of retention, employee development opportunities really need to be afforded to every employee in the workplace, not just a select few.
A formalized mentoring program is a powerful strategy for meeting employees where they are developmentally and creating a talent magnet culture where employees know how to pour into one another and how to access the resources and relationships they need to thrive.
To learn more about how Engage Mentoring can help you make mentoring easy, visit us at www.engagementoring.com.