How to Set Up an Employee Mentorship Program

A mentoring partnership can be beneficial to both the mentor and the mentee. It has the potential to come with some serious benefits for your business too. It can improve morale, boost the company culture, and increase internal promotions. If you want to get the most out of what mentorship has to offer, you have to set up an employee mentorship program.

Effective mentoring relationships don’t just happen by chance. They must be guided and cultivated for them to be truly successful. HR can scaffold an effective employee mentoring program that benefits everyone involved.

But exactly what does an employee mentorship program look like, and how do you build one from the ground up?

Here’s everything you need to know about mentorship programs in the workplace. We’ll start with exactly what a workplace mentorship program is.

What Is an Employee Mentorship Program?

Mentoring relationships come in many different shapes and sizes. In many cases, it’s up to the mentee to approach a possible mentor. These types of partnerships tend to be very informal. A mentor guides and provides support to a mentee when and how it’s most convenient for them.

Although informal arrangements can be beneficial, you’re leaving some of the best potential benefits on the table. If you want to make the most of mentor-mentee relationships, you need an actual employee mentorship program.

An employee mentorship program is structured and organized. The process of pairing mentors with mentees is facilitated by HR. There should be parameters in place regarding how often to meet, topics to tackle, and real goals to achieve.

It is meant to be an official program monitored with fully supported mentoring relationships. Mentors receive the tools and resources they need to successfully support their mentees. Mentees know what to expect from the relationship without worrying about trying to facilitate the relationship themselves.

What Types of Employee Mentorship Programs Are There?

Mentorship programs in the workplace should support your employees and the overarching goals of your business. That means there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, there are different types of employee mentorship programs for you to choose from that include:

• One-on-one mentorship
• Group Mentorship
• Peer mentorship
• New-hire mentorship
• Executive mentorship
• Reverse mentorship

One-on-one mentorship

One-on-one mentorships involve one mentor and one mentee. This is the most common mentoring relationship.

It often focuses on the mentee's skills and career development. This type of relationship is the most personal, with most mentors and mentees developing a close relationship. Mentors draw on their extensive knowledge and experiences to provide guidance, advice, and feedback to help support their mentees in achieving their personal and organizational goals.

Group Mentorship

Group mentorships involve at least three people but can include many more, depending on the situation. For example, a group of incoming employees may have the same mentor during a specific period while they get adjusted to their new job. In other cases, it could be the case that two or three employees might be mentored as candidates to fill upcoming management roles.

Whatever the situation, group mentorship is a great opportunity to foster shared learning and a sense of community. It allows mentees to learn from one another, in addition to learning from their mentor. They can develop their network and get support from their peers throughout the process.

Peer mentorship

Peer mentorship is usually considered the least formal employee mentorship program. That said, it still has value. It enables peers to learn from others with diverse perspectives and different backgrounds. Like group mentorships, it enables members to start building their professional network, but it also encourages collaboration and builds a sense of community.

In a more structured setting, peer mentoring might include specific goals, like job shadowing and collaborative projects. It can also be a great tool for keeping employees accountable, especially in a project-based setting.

New-hire mentorship

New-hire mentorships focus on helping new hires achieve success within the organization they have just started working for. They can include one-on-one mentorships, group mentorships, or even peer mentorships, but the goal remains the same—to provide support to new employees.

A new-hire employee mentorship program can focus on helping new employees learn the skills they need to be effective in their new role, but it’s an especially good option when it comes to acclimating new employees to the company culture. It’s a great way to make sure they understand the organization’s norms and values while supporting them as they adjust to the demands of their position.

Executive mentorship

Executive mentoring involves a senior leader mentoring a more junior employee. It's a great way for managers and C-suite executives to work with other employees in the organization that they otherwise might not interact with. It’s a great way to create a team-oriented spirit, give a face and personality to higher-ups, and provide junior-level employees with the ability to think more deeply about their career trajectory.

This type of employee mentorship program is also a great way for employees to learn more about the social and cultural elements of the company, as well as less tangible elements that lead to success above and beyond skill development.

Reverse mentorship

Reverse mentorship is a unique and refreshing take on an employee mentorship program. While most mentoring relationships focus on the more experienced member providing support to the less experienced employee, a reverse mentorship does the opposite.

Less experienced employees mentor more senior-level employees, providing them with fresh perspectives and innovative new ideas. It’s a great way to boost confidence among junior-level employees and enable them to contribute to the company in meaningful ways while still receiving input and feedback from a more experienced member of the company.

What Are the Benefits of Having an Employee Mentorship Program?

Creating and facilitating an employee mentoring program takes time and effort. With so much to do, it’s easy to make the case that it’s best skipped in favor of other, seemingly more pressing matters.

Your organization can indeed get by without an employee mentorship program, but you’ll miss out on some serious benefits that could propel your company to new heights:

• Improve employee morale and company culture
• Attract top talent
• Promote from within
• Support and retain a diverse workforce
• Increase in knowledge shared throughout the organization
• Increase employee trust
• Increase a sense of purpose
• Increase tenure
• Bridge the generational divide
• Ripple effect

Improve employee morale and company culture

An employee mentorship program enables employees to get to know their peers, as well as management while offering and receiving support at the same time. A natural consequence of this type of relationship among employees is that it automatically improves employee morale and has the power to create a culture of caring and support.

It’s mighty among the youngest generations of workers. Over 80% of young people want their supervisor to care about their lives and want their supervisor to help them set performance goals. An official workplace mentorship program can help them get the support and care they crave, which will positively impact their attitude at work.

Attract top talent 

Employees want to advance their careers, with 67% of respondents in one survey saying it's important. If you can demonstrate that your organization operates an employee mentorship program that focuses on skill development and career advancement, you can attract the best and brightest to your organization.

Promote from within

The higher up the position in your organization is, the more expensive it is to hire, with costs starting at half that position’s annual salary and costing up to two times, or even more for C-suite level executives.

It’s much more cost-effective to promote from within, but that means you have to develop the talent that is already there. An employee mentorship program is a great way to teach the necessary skills and groom a more junior-level employee to step into a higher role when a position becomes available instead of hiring someone outside of the company.

Support and retain a diverse workforce

Not only do employees expect a more diverse workforce, with three job seekers stating that a diverse workforce is important, but it has the potential to impact your bottom line. Diverse companies have a 19% boost in innovation revenues, with diverse companies 70% more likely to enter and capture a new market more easily.

An employee mentorship program can help support a diverse workforce by providing everyone with the support they need to be successful. You’ll retain your employees as well, which will lead to more innovations and increased profits.

Increase in knowledge shared throughout the organization

It can be difficult to speak up and share personal experiences, especially for junior-level employees, but their ideas can be valuable because they can lead to innovative changes. You can encourage your employees to share their knowledge with an employee mentorship program.

A mentorship program encourages employees to build meaningful relationships with one another. It gives them a platform to share their experience and their knowledge with peers as well as managers, and that knowledge and experience can lead to new projects, new partnerships, and innovative new ideas.

Increase employee trust

Trust is extremely important in the workplace. Trusting employees are a whopping 260% more motivated to work, over 40% less likely to call into work for the day off, and 50% less likely to search for another job. But building trust takes time. You can take that time with an employee mentorship program.

Mentorship programs in the workplace give employees the ability to interact with and communicate with each other outside of everyday tasks and responsibilities. Employees can talk about their goals, gain insight, and share their experiences, which all lead to greater feelings of trust.

Increase a sense of purpose

Many employees search for a sense of purpose in their work, with 70% of employees stating that their purpose is defined by their work. You can help your employees zero in on their purpose within your organization through mentoring.

An employee mentorship program enables employees to think more deeply about their current contributions, as well as how they might like to grow and evolve within the company. It's a way for both junior- and senior-level employees to more deeply understand the values and mission of the company, which can help them feel like their contributions have value.

Increase tenure 

A lot can be said about the benefits of reducing employee turnover and increasing tenure within your company, but at the end of the day, happy employees stay longer while unhappy ones don’t.

A whopping 91% of employees who have mentors reported being happy with their job. They are also more likely to believe they are well compensated, and they're more likely to believe their contributions are valued. Because they feel supported, they are much more likely to stick around to learn and grow with your company.

Bridge the generational divide

There are a lot of misunderstandings between different generations, but each generation has something unique and beneficial to offer your company. You have the potential to lessen intergenerational misconceptions, break down stereotypes, and encourage collaboration with an employee mentoring program.

Not only do mentoring relationships enable older generations who are likely in a management role to impart their knowledge to the next generation, but younger generations can share their fresh perspectives with older generations that can become set in their ways. Mentoring provides the stage where trust can be built and ideas can be shared when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

Ripple effect

Supporting a mentorship program in your organization means more than going down the list of benefits for your business. It has a ripple effect that has the potential to impact your business in ways you may not expect.

For example, mentees are five times more likely to get promoted and advance in pay grade. Retention rates are higher for both mentors and mentees, with more diversity likely among management-level employees. You never know what new ideas might come from a mentoring program or how a junior-level employee could impact the business if they are groomed for a higher role. You just have to start an employee mentorship program and see where it takes you.

What Is the Difference Between Coaching and Employee Mentorship Programs?

Coaching and a workplace mentorship program are similar in that they both involve guidance and can involve both personal and professional development, but there are also quite a few differences.

One of the biggest differences is that coaching involves paying for a program that is created by the coach. Outcomes are reliant on both the coach and the people being coached, and the process is more formal than mentoring. Usually, participants are looking for a specific short-term outcome and follow a program led by the coach to achieve it.

In contrast, employee mentorship programs aren’t paid. The relationship is often less formal and catered to the mentee, depending on their personal and professional goals. There is no set-in-stone program, which means the relationship can evolve with or without a firm end date for working together.

Even if you want to utilize coaching services now or in the future, you should still create a mentoring program. Their flexible nature and ability to focus on ongoing, long-term goals with benefits to the mentor, mentee, and organization make it time well-spent for any company.

How to Establish an Employee Mentorship Program

An employee mentorship program isn’t something you should leave to your employees. It can be intimidating to approach another person about a mentorship relationship, and without a formal structure, it’s easy to skip meetings or end up not making any progress.

HR needs to develop a plan that supports both mentors and mentees within their relationships while facilitating growth and development that supports the goals and objectives of your organization.

Here’s exactly how to do that:

• Identify the goals for the program
• Create a timeline
• Build out a framework
• Spread the word, then launch registrations
• Match mentors with the right mentees
• Check-in on mentors and mentees throughout the process
• Collect feedback when the employee mentorship program ends
• Improve the program for next time

Identify the goals for the program

First, it’s important to identify what goals you want to achieve with your employee mentorship program. For example, do you want to partner junior-level employees with senior-level employees to groom them for management positions? Do you want to boost understanding and cooperation between older and younger employees? Do you want employees to learn new skills that other employees already possess?

Keep in mind that you can have more than one goal, and those goals can be flexible. It’s especially important to allow mentors and mentees to have some input into what their goals for the partnership are so they get the support they want too.

Create a timeline

Once you have identified the goals you have for your employee mentorship program, consider how long it will take to achieve them. You might set a goal for six months, one year, or longer, depending on the goals you want to achieve.

Partnerships don’t have to fizzle out after the time is up, either. Let the end of your initial timeline be a chance for you, mentors, and mentees to assess the program and decide if it should continue. You could allow partnerships to keep working together, you could shake things up and create new partnerships, or you could give everyone the ability to decide for themselves if they want to maintain a more informal mentoring relationship until you’re ready to start the next round of your official employee mentorship program.

Build out a framework 

With your timeline in place, you can build a framework for exactly how the employee mentorship program will unfold. You’ll have to decide how often mentors are required to meet with mentees and whether they should meet online or in person. You can also decide if mentors will meet one-on-one with their mentees or if they can meet in groups.

You should also create time in everyone’s schedule to meet so no one is tempted to cancel meetings because they don’t have time. For example, if you ask them to meet over lunch, extend lunch so that they have time to eat and talk.

Once you’ve built the framework, plug it into a larger performance management platform, like PerformYard. It allows HR to track partnerships, but it also makes it easier for mentors and mentees to keep tabs on their achievements.

Spread the word, then launch registrations

Once you’ve got the bones of your employee mentorship program figured out, you have to spread the word about the program. It’s important to let employees know if they will be required to participate, but it’s especially important to share the details if participation is optional.

Employees at all levels of the organization need to know your goals and the time commitment to decide if they want to register or not, as well as what capacity they would like to participate.

Match mentors with the right mentees 

Arguably, the most challenging aspect of an employee mentorship program is matching the right mentors with the right mentees. When you initially launch the program, it’s a good idea to offer mentors and mentees the ability to request who they would like to work with. Chances are, when you announce that you’re launching the program, some partnerships will develop naturally.

Even if some mentors and mentees partner up on their own, you’ll likely have to help partner up the remaining participants. It’s a good idea to give both mentors and mentees some input into whether they want to work with the person you’ve paired them with. After all, the partnership is only going to be successful if both parties are invested.

You might have to be a bit flexible to make it work. For example, if you have more mentees than mentors, you might have to create a group mentorship program.

No matter how you choose to tackle matching mentors with mentees, make sure that you outline the process ahead of time and make it clear so everyone knows exactly what to expect from the process.

Check-in on mentors and mentees throughout the process

When mentoring partnerships work, they work. It’s also true that partnerships that aren’t working can be stressful, frustrating, and detrimental to the goals you set for the program. That’s why it’s important to check on mentors and mentees throughout the process.

Check-in with every partnership and see how things are going. If a mentor or mentee is struggling, try to give them some support or consider modifying the framework so they find it easier to work together. If all else fails and a partnership isn’t working, don’t be afraid to end things early. It’s better to dissolve a partnership that is causing distress rather than see it through to its end for the sake of completing the program.

Collect feedback when the employee mentorship program ends

Keep your ears open and document the feedback you get from mentors and mentees throughout the process, but you should also have a system for collecting feedback when the employee mentorship program comes to an end.

PerformYard makes it easy to request feedback that can be personalized for a workplace mentorship program. You could also create a survey for each participant to fill out about whether they achieved their goals and what they would recommend if the program were to continue.

Improve the program for next time 

Not only should you collect feedback from participants, but you should also use that feedback to make improvements to the employee mentorship program for next time. It will make the program better overall, but it also demonstrates to employees that you are taking their feedback to heart to make the program even better.

Having an Effective Employee Mentorship Program Matters

Not all mentoring partnerships are created equal. If you want to see the benefits that mentoring has to offer, HR has to take the helm and create an effective employee mentorship program that serves mentors, mentees, and the organization as a whole.

A flexible performance management platform can help. PerformYard provides a place where meetings and conversations can be documented, HR can request feedback, and mentees can track and manage their goals so your employee mentoring program can evolve and best serve your workforce.