5 Ways Mentoring is Crucial in Making Employee Engagement Happen

« Back to Articles

Mentoring is an essential practice for organisations who want motivated and competent employees. In fact, according to a 2022 PushFar Report, around 86% of professionals state that they’ve stayed longer in an organisation because of excellent mentoring opportunities, while 4 in 10 employees have said that’ve thought about quitting because of lack of mentorship.

Organisations that want to get ahead in the industry should allocate budget and time to mentorship for employees. Mentoring doesn’t have to take up a lot of time and can be done in an informal way within daily stand-ups too. Plus, the benefits of mentorship aren’t limited to mentees. Leaders who mentor junior professionals will inevitably learn new and valuable skills in the process, enhancing their career.

What is Mentoring at Work?

Mentoring establishes a vital bond among colleagues for their mutual growth and benefit. In a traditional sense, mentorship is when a seasoned senior professional teams up with a younger employee to transfer skills. These can range from technical skills, i.e., learning to use an online process library, to soft skills like networking and active listening.

This process is often referred to as informal mentoring, as it usually occurs when a senior professional takes their junior worker under their wing because they’ve taken a liking to them.

However, the problem with informal mentoring is that senior resources will only agree to teach those employees that they like, excluding others. This makes growth opportunities for junior resources a matter of luck and can make them feel left out.

This is where formal mentoring comes in. Companies that establish a formal mentoring program, i.e., where they match mentees and mentors, will find that their employees become motivated and their productivity increases. Formal mentoring means an abundant supply of long-term support for both mentor and mentee, allowing them to continue their mutual relationship for a long time.

There are plenty of ways in which an organisation can run a large mentoring program. They can use spreadsheets to track sessions, have weekly check-ins with employees or opt for a mentoring platform such as PushFar. Mentorship is the key to increasing employee engagement and keeping them motivated.
`
How Does Mentoring Increase Employee Engagement?

Here are some ways in which mentoring can create more opportunities for employee engagement:

1. Retains Valuable Resources

High-performing employees are also called High Potential (HiPo) workers, and they’re crucial for the organisation in which they work. Retaining this talent is harder than it seems because there are always headhunters looking for top-performers. Mentoring is a great solution to this problem.

Assign mentors to HiPo employees and allow the latter to grow continually. These employees want to be engaged and challenged, not isolated and forgotten about.

They will love the chance to learn new skills and boost their career growth by being engaged in a high-quality mentorship program. They will continue to work in the organisation if they are engaged in this way, thereby adding more value.

2. Increases Employee Satisfaction

Employees do their best work when they are satisfied with their job. A worker who isn’t engaged by the company will feel disconnected from their role and might end up quitting.

What a guide to sales coaching and employee mentoring will tell you is that professionals who have good mentors are constantly engaged and feel that the company cares about their growth. Moreover, they have a sense of fulfilment and are more productive compared to workers who aren’t engaged or attached to mentors.

3. Boosts Knowledge Sharing

Growth-oriented employees enjoy intelligent engagement. Mentorship provides an excellent way to share skills and knowledge among your workforce. It encourages employees to interact, engage, and collaborate both with the organisation and each other. A knowledge sharing-culture helps reticent employees ask for help to improve something they might be self-conscious about.

For example, if an employee is confused about creating a forecast sheet, another worker can show them how to use Excel for basic forecasting. This sort of skill sharing mutually benefits both parties and makes them feel engaged with their work.

4. Solidifies Company Culture

Mentoring programs can impact your company culture in the best way by actively engaging employees, leading to motivation and satisfaction boosts. Your workers will want to be involved with the organisation, thereby increasing retention rate, productivity, and good feeling throughout the company. This creates a wholesome workplace environment that continues to engage employees and keep them happy.

5. Nurtures Diversity

Pairing mentors with mentees can make certain members of your workforce feel more included. A well-made mentorship program can shine a spotlight on underrepresented workers, giving them a chance to voice their concerns and engage with the company.

This specifically helps employees that are part of minority groups or underrepresented social or ethnic groups, or even shy workers who haven’t had a chance to speak up yet. Nurturing diversity through mentorship will engage all of your employees by making them feel represented, included, and valued.

It will also lead to better ROI overall as employees actively engage with and work for the organisation with renewed spirit.

Bonus: Plan, Plan, Plan

Keep in mind that even the best programs can fail if they’re not well thought-out. When you want to establish a mentorship program, make sure that you do proper research and create a strategy to follow. A good approach is to set micro and macro-objectives and goals that will let you know whether your plan is working.

Consult your HR department and figure out a plan that matches mentors to mentees, provides support when necessary, and monitors progress. The goals you choose can range from organisational ones to individual objectives. Once these are in place, ensure you ease your employees into the program so as not to alienate or isolate anyone. Be transparent about the plan so both mentors and mentees are able to take ownership of their roles throughout.

A well-laid-out mentorship program is a crucial step to engaging employees and boosting productivity, retention rates, and organisational performance, so make sure to formulate a winning plan.

Author Bio

Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that gives business owners and sales representatives useful call details using features like a business vanity number from Dialpad. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualising how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Jenna has also written for other domains such as Brightpearl and smile.io.