By Mentoring Programs are important for companies that are growing. As an owner, you should look forward to making a long-term relationship with your employees and managers.
After all, the people who have been working for long with your organization understand its core values and goals.
Losing such assets can be a bad decision. Companies don’t fire many of their managers and strategic employees even if they wish to, just because a competitor might take advantage of this.
Therefore, you should be practical about training your current staff for better performance rather than finding new ones. Mentoring programs aim to train your employees and teach them techniques and methods from the current industry.
Be it technology, media, entertainment, or manufacturing, the technologies are always changing, and innovation is no new thing. Therefore, your employees always need that knowledge even if you have hired them after much scrutiny.
These programs are not a plan for companies. Another popular type of mentoring activity is the career mentor sessions.
Career mentors help out students with meeting alumni, choosing a career path, or getting to know a field better by meeting professionals. In the same way, an employee mentoring program can help your workers meet professionals and get to know more!
If you’re reading this article to know how to design the best possible mentoring sessions, you’re at the right place. We will help you create plans that provide fruitful results to your clients.
Key Benefits Of Mentoring Programs
Employees Are Motivated
First of all, these programs boost employee satisfaction. The providers should ensure that the mentoring sessions leave the employees feeling more motivated and satisfied at the end of the session.
This is important because employee satisfaction plays an important role in boosting productivity.
Learning Culture
These programs work best when the organization has an active learning culture.
If the employees aren’t used to learning and taking training, they will find it hard to implement things. Not only that, but the trainers will also find it hard to teach them new methods they won’t be able to apply.
Some say that it is crucial to Have educated employees that at least have a high-school diploma. However, that’s not the only thing that helps people learn better.
Developing a ‘learning culture’ involves making people more eager to learn about new methods and making themselves more productive.
Strong Communication Within Employees
Many mentoring programs encourage employee collaboration and give the training to work together. The employees and workers will work better if they understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
If the workers work with better collaboration, they can identify more loopholes in the system than a manager can. A mentor’s responsibility includes creating this sense of collaboration and encouraging employees to communicate.
These programs can also teach workers to check their emails or phones for an organizational messages or to check a noticeboard daily to get the latest policy news. Thus, rather than going to the manager, the workers will know what to do just via a message or notice.
Steps To Create A Perfect Plan
Choosing A Mentor
Choosing the ideal mentor is a time-consuming task. The company has to interview tons of people and choose which one out of them can provide valuable knowledge in the best way. The mentor also has to understand the mindset of your employees.
Understanding an organization’s core values is a core part of ideal mentoring programs.
Identify Goals For The Company
The mentor should be able to lead their sessions in the direction the company wants. If the company wants its employees to learn about the latest technologies in the industry, they should know it.
On the other hand, if the company wishes a mentoring program to raise organizational ethics awareness, you should find a mentor for just that.
Selecting The Right Matching Choice Technique
Your employees need a mentor who understands their personalized needs and then caters to them. At the same time, there should be a lot of authority left to the administrative team. Neither the company nor the mentoring program wants things to be completely autonomous for anyone.
Moreover, keeping room for suggestions and advice is always a good idea to make the program more productive. In many parts of the world, online mentorships are a common thing.
The main reason is that people have less time to spend on training and the employees already have enough work due for the day. The most common mentorships that happen physically are career mentor programs for students.
However, selecting the right matching technique can also make your on-site mentoring program successful. Here are some common techniques you can choose from:
Bulk Match: This is a matching technique whereby a large group of people from the entire team gets one mentor. That is, one mentor handles more than one mentee.
Bulk Matching is largely beneficial for the mentees, but not so much for the mentor since they just act as a teacher. However, this method is not so common for employee mentoring.
This is because many employees might lose focus, and the tasks they are training for are more practical. Career mentoring programs that students enroll in are more known for this type of mentoring.
Self Match: This is the most common technique in companies and organizations. Moreover, these can be productive for both the mentors and mentees. Every mentor here deals solely with their mentee, and they both get to choose each other.
Therefore, any particular employee can choose the best mentor for themselves, and there is more chance of a greater understanding between the two.
Admin Match: Admin matching is mostly a trend when the organization wishes to have control over the mentoring process. Here the heads of the team make mentor-mentee groups as they deem fit.
They might place more productive employees as mentees with different mentors. On the other hand, new employees or interns will have different trainers.
Final Verdict:
Planning an ideal mentoring program is not easy. You have to plan strategies and outline goals, as explained above. Green Apple can certainly provide you with these services ideally!
