Start a mentoring program

Here are five key steps for building a mentorship program in your workplace. Companies typically design mentorship programs to help improve performances.

You can achieve this in many ways. Another option is to develop a mentorship program for leadership development that helps to groom prospective managers for promotions. Determine where your company would benefit most from mentorship. Identify prospective mentees that your program will target and explore how these individuals will benefit from mentorship. Where the target employees are in their professional journeys. What developmental needs the program will address.

What can motivate these individuals to participate in your program. Set objectives for your mentoring program with a persona for your typical mentee in mind. Choose objectives that are clear, measurable and attainable. These objectives can help organizational leaders understand the value of your program and give your mentors clear targets to aim for. Mentoring programs in the workplace can take many forms.

Whether the mentor-mentee relationship will be one on one, project-based or in a group setting. Chart the process from program enrollment to objectives completion through an assessment that will help you determine how beneficial the mentorship was to those involved. A diagram can help you visualize the critical steps your mentors and mentees will take. Create an evaluation of the mentorship program. Civic engagement has the potential to empower young adults, increase their self-determination, and give them the skills and self-confidence they need to enter the workforce.

We need your ideas! Click here to share. Starting a Mentoring Program. Assess the needs and resources available in the community and see if there are existing programs with a similar mission or with which you might be able to collaborate. Learn more about community assessments and view other youth serving programs in your area.

Design the parameters of the program. Define the youth population that will be served. Consider age, gender, mentoring need, and common characteristics. Identify who you will recruit as mentors. Determine the type of mentoring relationships e.

Determine the focus of the mentoring relationships. Academic School to career Positive youth development Determine where the mentoring sessions will occur. Determine how often mentors and mentees will meet and the desired length of the mentoring matches.

Determine desired outcomes. Determine if the program will stand alone or collaborate with other programs. Identify key stakeholders and generate buy-in. Plan how the program will be evaluated. Develop policies and procedures to support the program. Establish a case management protocol to ensure communication with mentors and mentees. Plan how the program will be managed e.

Identify a management team. Thirdly, what are you looking to achieve from the mentoring program? And how can you measure success? In order to tackle a challenge such as low employee engagement, you must define the metrics and KPIs you will be tracking in advance.

You can use these KPIs to set goals in order to have a definition of success for your program. This step is crucial to get right, as program managers will often have to report ROI of the program to senior management.

This being said, it's not all business goals and objectives. You must also outline what success could be for the mentees and mentors and how you can track and measure their goals as well.

At this planning stage, conduct some research to find out the key reasons for interest in mentoring amongst your company, and what they would be hoping to achieve by taking part. This way you can design your program to fit both your needs as a business and the needs of your people. It will also help when it comes to attracting participation! From this first step, you might decide to design a whole mentoring program around a specific goal, as LVMH have done with increasing gender diversity.

There are a whole host of other questions to help design the specifics of your mentoring program, with a lot depending on the type of organisation and the objectives of the program.

The trick is to try and be as detailed as possible here, and map out your whole mentoring program from start to finish. For more support, download our detailed e-book:. A key challenge for mentoring program organisers is doing all of the work above, and then getting low participation rates. If you can do all of the above, you shouldn't have a problem attracting participants to start a mentoring program! The details the participants were required to enter upon sign up — such as background, skills, experience, interests and so on — can be used to match mentees with mentors who can best help them reach their goals.

Most of the time, this is done manually by the program organisers, as they have the best knowledge of the objectives and participants. To avoid this, businesses can use mentoring software to match their employees. Guider makes smart, relevant and accurate mentor matches based on data inputted by participants. This removes bias and democratises mentoring within organisations.

Now the mentors and mentees are matched and connected, your mentoring program is well under way. But if you thought this is where you can sit back and let the mentoring relationships blossom, you thought wrong.