Mentoring Program Benefits

What are the benefits of mentoring?

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Benefits of Mentoring Programs

Doing successful, profitable business in today’s fast-paced, competitive, and demanding world means finding the lowest-cost, highest-quality solutions for your organization’s needs. There is no question that your greatest asset is your people and their collective knowledge capital, and that strategically enhancing your organization's talent translates into real bottom line results.

Unlike traditional training programs, which are often expensive and time consuming, mentoring programs provide a cost-efficient alternative for getting your employees up to speed. Today, formal mentoring programs can enhance the effectiveness of any talent management strategy:

Recruitment and Onboarding

A promise of a supportive mentor and a structured mentoring program will instantly attract the most capable and motivated candidates to your organization. In this way, you signal to all potential employees that you are invested in their personal and professional success, and will go the extra mile to nurture their careers. Once you determine your new hires, a mentoring program will enable them to get to understand your organization faster and adapt to your culture, making your onboarding process more efficient and effective.

Talent Development

Mentoring enables each of your employees to reach their full potential at your organization. It gives you the ability to promote your employees’ personal and professional development in a strategic and supportive way, leading to enhanced return on investment per individual.

Employee Retention

Retain your most promising leaders through formal mentoring. High potential employees stay and thrive at organizations where they see themselves achieving their career goals and receiving the guidance they need to grow, both as professionals and as people. Mentoring is one of the best ways to ensure that your best employees feel nurtured by your organization.

Employee Productivity

Mentees develop direct, hands-on skills tailored to their individual needs, on a just-in-time basis. This enables employees to stay productive on the job instead of having to attend hours or days of traditional classroom training. Where traditional training programs may illustrate theory, mentoring partnerships help employees translate theory into action with the ability to use their learning immediately on projects or assignments.

Diversity Enhancement

While mentoring is key to retention across the board at any organization, it contributes most notably to the retention of women and minority employees. Often, women, racial/ethnic minorities, and international employees indicate that the presence or absence of a supportive mentoring program at their organization is what ultimately drives their decision to stay or to leave the organization. Mentoring helps you keep your talented employees of all backgrounds, adding a creative knowledge-base and establishing your competitive advantage in front of an increasingly diverse clientele.

Knowledge Sharing

With the current and impending retirement of millions of Baby Boomers and an aging workforce, it is crucial for organizations to retain the wealth of knowledge and experience of more seasoned employees. Mentoring partnerships provide direct opportunities for knowledge sharing - enhancing and tapping into knowledge capital within an organization.

Employer Branding

The organizations that achieve the most sustainable success are those that attract the best people to develop their strategies and achieve their goals. An effective mentoring program brands your organization as one that truly cares about its employees, helping your organization continuously attract the best people for the roles you need.

Development of High Potentials

Mentoring motivates and engages your high-potential employees. The most crucial employees at your organization are your high-potential employees, who provide you with the means to build a sustainable talent pipeline. A targeted mentoring program enables you to actively motivate and engage your most promising people - an indispensable part of successful workforce planning and succession planning strategy.

Skill and Leadership Development

Mentoring develops employee skills and qualities that are useful far beyond the mentoring partnership. The benefits of mentoring for employees extends far beyond the specific competencies that they strive to develop. All participants in the mentoring program enhance not only their target competencies, but also their leadership skills, teamwork, ability to compromise, and self-awareness. All of these hard and soft skills add to your employees’ value to your organization.

Contact us today to find out how our mentoring solutions can help you realize these objectives at your organization.

Mentoring Program Benefits & ROI

TALENT OBJECTIVE	WITH MENTORING...	EVIDENCE
General Employee Development	Gain a valuable tool for developing employees that can be incorporated into your overall TM strategy	Most Fortune 500 companies see mentoring as an important employee development tool, with 71% of them having mentoring programs. (Terri Scandura, management professor and dean of the graduate school at the University of Miami, 2006)
Retention	Retain your most promising leaders through formal mentoring. High potential employees stay and thrive at organizations where they see themselves achieving their career goals and receiving the guidance they need to grow both personally and professionally.	Employees involved in the mentoring program had retention rates of 72 percent on average, compared with 49 percent for those not in the program. (Sun Microysystems study of over 1000 employees over 5 years)
Performance Management/Employee Engagement	Empower employees to adjust and monitor their goals proactively and interactively with the help of other individuals, instilling an employee-driven aspect of performance management strategy, as well as enhancing employee engagement for increased productivity	A survey of 2,875 Black managers found that they valued mentoring at almost double the rate of performance feedback. (National Black MBA Association)
Diversity and Inclusion	Align diversity initiatives with overall talent and business goals to deliver not only the numbers that prove diversity, but the networks of inclusion that generate sustainable diversity in the long-run. Give leaders and managers the opportunity to discover additional talent nestled within your organization that can be leveraged for business gains	Out of 1735 women surveyed in 30 Fortune 1000 companies, 48 percent cited "not having an infuential mentor or sponsor" as their greatest impediment, while 33 percent cited "lack of role models in my racial/ethnic group." (Catalyst's "Women of Color in Corporate Management" survey, 1999)
Effective Onboarding	Enable new employees to establish relationships specifically for professional development - so they can adjust quickly and comprehensively to your corporate culture and use their experience in a way that aligns with your brand and business goals	When an experienced worker switches to a new organization, he/she may carry "employment baggage" - a set of attitudes, norms and experiences that apply only to the previous organization. This "baggage" can actually cause work experience to have a NEGATIVE effect on performance at a new job with a different culture. (study conducted by Nancy Rothbard, Wharton Management Professor, 2007)
Career Development / Succession Planning/Leadership Development	Set the stage to fill your key leadership positions with the most promising individuals within your organization, and give those individuals the opportunity to gain the best possible understanding of the organization through the eyes of existing leaders	Mentors were promoted six times more often than those not in the program; mentees were promoted five times more often than those not in the program; and retention rates were much higher for mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than for employees who did not participate in the mentoring program (49%). (Sun Microsystems study of over 1000 employees over 5 years, 2006)

Mentoring Case Studies - Benefits

TALENT OBJECTIVE	BUSINESS ISSUE	WITH MENTORING...	EVIDENCE
Diversity and Inclusion Industry: Manufacturing and Distribution Size: 8000	The Diversity Task Force discovered a correlation between career development success and retention rates among employee groups. Employees that were not being promoted as quickly as the others, on average, had a turnover rate of 23%, in stark comparison with a 7% turnover rate for the rest of the employees at the organization. Most notably, many individuals that were hired into the plant were not advancing to corporate leadership roles.	The mentoring program targeted those employees who were not being promoted as quickly as other employees. Within 6 months, individuals began to move into managerial/leadership positions both in and out of the plant. Managers who were mentors disovered a multitude of talent within the organization that they previously had not been aware of. As one mentor put it, “We've been hiring externally to fill positions in our Marketing Department, and the talent was here in our plant all along.”	The turnover rate for the specific targeted groups had dropped rapidly to 12%.
Accelerating Learning Curves Industry: Technology Size: 5000	Leaders in the organization wanted to accelerate the learning curve within a specific job role. For this specific role, it took a new hire, on average, approximately 18 months to become "fully functional" in the position.	A mentoring program delivered on-the-job development that reinforced classroom training. Ultimately, individuals who underwent classroom training without the followup of on-the-job mentoring had a slower learning curve than individuals who engaged in both mentoring and training.	The speed of the average learning curve for this specific position was decreased by 28%, from 18 months to 13 months.
Quicker Onboarding Process Industry: Pharmaceuticals Size: 25000	The organization's existing onboarding process took 3-3.5 months. It needed an expedited and better-targeted onboarding process for new hires.	Mentoring accelerated new hire onboarding and up-to-speed training by pairing each new hire with a qualified mentor that focused on the new hire’s targeted needs. This program replaced the previously existing generic orientation process.	Onboarding time was reduced from 3.5 months to 6 weeks, enhancing employee productivity from the get-go.
Reduced Training Budgets Industry: Arts/Entertainment Size: 8000	As part of across-the-board budget cuts, training budgets were significantly slashed, reducing the funding available for instructor led training.	Individuals developed their skills through a mentoring relationship rather than a mandatory training course.	The mentoring initiative, in lieu of a training course, saved significant costs for the organization - including training costs, travel costs, and productivity costs from employees being away from the job.
Limited Training Budgets Industry: Automobile Manufacturing Size: 23000	From 2002 to 2004, the employee population grew, but training budgets remained the same. The organization had to fulfil an increased quantity of training needs with the same resource capacity as before.	Leaders in the organization identified professional development activities that could be accomplished with mentoring relationships, and switched from formal training to mentoring in these areas. This freed up crucial funding that was directed toward additional training and development activities.	The organization was able to use its limited training budget with the utmost efficiency - Increased hours of professional development activities took place without a corresponding cost increase.
Adjustment to Corporate Culture Industry: Technology Size: 5000	How to change/instill new behaviors of present employees that would align with the new culture the organization wanted to implement.	Qualified individuals that displayed the behaviors exemplifed by the organization were chosen as mentors, who served as role models for other employees. New employees were able to observe the behaviors of these mentors and naturally adjust to the organization's culture.	Employees learned specific behaviors crucial to success in the organization far more quickly than their past counterparts, who had learned them through vision statements and other static reading and training materials. Ultimately, many mentees became mentors themselves, passing along the good examples.

Mentoring Articles

• Designing a Mentoring Program That Improves Onboarding(January 07, 2013)
  So where does one start when thinking about designing a mentoring program to support onboarding? Here are recommendations that provide a starting point.
• Mentoring Program Mistakes and How to Avoid Them(December 14, 2012)
  Common Mistakes of Mentoring Programs and how to avoid them
• Mentoring and Talent Development: How to do they fit together?(November 07, 2012)
  If you are considering a targeted mentoring program for talent development, or if you presently manage a mentoring program, chances are you've been asked to provide a road map where at the end you are expected to tie it all together and prove it's business value and ROI.
• Insala Releases Hi-Impact Mentoring Version 5, Includes Mentoring and Coaching Integrated in a Single Software Solution(November 02, 2012)
  The release of version 5 of its online mentoring software system that now allows administrators to integrate their mentoring and coaching program into a single online solution
• Tech-Infused Mentoring - Online Mentoring Technology(June 20, 2012)
  Online mentoring technology can offer an efficient solution for the challenges of implementing and managing a successful program.
• How Can Mentoring Facilitate Learning and Development Across An Organization?(June 20, 2012)
  Mentoring is used today by organizations to satisfy any number of unique business objectives from onboarding, diversity or most often centering on leadership development, succession planning, employee career development and knowledge transfer.
• 7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Mentoring Program(May 11, 2012)
  Corporate mentoring programs are no different. To minimize challenges and maximize program results, we’d like to share seven recommendations that have proven successful to real-world mentoring program challenges.
• Insala Presents Hi-Impact Mentoring: How You Can Learn More From Others at CIPD 2012 HRD Conference in London(Mar 28, 2012)
  Insala chief executive officer will present “Hi-Impact Mentoring: How you can learn more from others” at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development