5 Ways to Get Your Mentoring Programmes Working Effectively in 2019

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In the recent past, employee engagement, staff retention and productivity have become more challenging. With a flourishing jobs market, it’s increasingly tricky to keep employees engaged, working effectively and ultimately happy. And yet, more and more individuals are now looking for mentoring to help them to get ahead in their career, industry and job. Mentoring might just be the solution you need in your organisation in 2019! You may well already have a mentoring scheme setup but is it doing what it needs to be doing or is it becoming a burden to manage, report-on and ultimately succeed at? We’ve outlined a few ways in which you can get mentoring programmes and schemes to run more effectively this year – and yes, most of them revolve around PushFar’s platform.

1. Make Mentor-Matching Easier
Mentor matching is not an easy task. There is a lot to consider and even once you have taken everything into account, it can be a very manual process. We’ve written an article on 5 important factors to consider when mentor-matching which you can read here. But let’s be honest, manual mentor-matching is not effective and simply isn’t scalable either, for larger mentoring programmes. PushFar can help you here! Our mentor matching technology works with a lot of machine-learning, complex algorithms and an ever-growing network of mentors and mentees.

2. Encourage More Mentoring
Mentoring is relevant and beneficial to everyone, at every level. Whether the CEO or the student intern – mentoring can help anybody, whether they be a mentor or mentee. If you are tasked with encouraging mentoring at your organisation, then it’s important to make sure you open it up to everyone. The more individuals getting involved in mentoring, the more effective it will be. And it often starts from the top. So, encourage everyone to consider either mentoring or being mentored (or both!).

3. Keep Engagement Levels Up
Mentoring is very easy to ‘drop’, and it often falls off people’s radars when work-loads increase, client projects become larger and everything else gets in the way. As a result, mentoring engagement levels often flounder and fall after a few months. Keeping engagement can be tricky and is often another manual process – sending emails, checking on mentor statuses and sending company-wide emails about mentoring. It doesn’t have to be though, because PushFar can help here too. Our technology sends intelligently-timed and automated emails to individuals based on activity-levels. An example would be if a mentee has not setup or scheduled a meeting with their mentor for more than 30 days. At this point, PushFar’s mentoring software would automatically email the individual and give them a helpful reminder. This is just one of dozens of automated email notifications that can help keep engagement levels up, where mentoring is concerned.

4. Educate Individuals on Mentoring
There is still a lack of understanding around what mentoring entails, involves and how it can help. We have a wealth of resources to help explain the benefits of mentoring and how it can help with career progression, engagement and all-round professional success. Make sure that you don’t neglect the importance of educating employees in your organisation about what mentoring is, how to be a mentor or mentee and how to use mentoring.

5. Allow for Flexibility
We all work in different ways and with increased flexible working, mentoring is no exception to this. Mentoring can be most effective when it is up to the mentor and mentee how they structure their mentoring relationship. Putting too many rules and regulations in place for mentoring can often put individuals off the idea of mentoring and result in far less mentoring success and engagement. Mentoring is not formal, unlike coaching. And while having guidelines to great mentoring is a good idea, having too many rules is not good.

So, there we have it. Five ways in which you can get mentoring programmes and schemes working for you this year. If you are interested in finding out more about how PushFar’s mentoring technology and software can help your organisation, then click here to get in touch.