4 Advantages Of Mentoring From An Organizational Perspective

According to a Deloitte survey, 70% of companies are seriously concerned about their lack of employee engagement and retention. Most employers typically spend six to nine months of an employee’s salary on recruitment, training, and replacement.

It is essential for millennial employees, who are three times more likely to switch jobs than their previous employed generations. Hence, companies are leaving no stone unturned to engage their employees. Mentorship programs are finding their way back into most organizational processes today.  

While mentoring has been a traditional process, it is adopted in many modern forms within large organizations. Almost 70% of Fortune 500 companies have structured mentoring programs. These new programs are designed to provide the millennial generation and employers with the right technology and training to increase productivity for employees and profitability for businesses.  

By adopting the right mentoring strategies, organizations have been able to gain the following advantages.

1. Recruitment and On-boarding

Going through a mentoring program helps recruits understand an organization better and adapt faster to the work culture. It also helps reduce time to productivity for recruits. British Telecommunications has witnessed the benefits of mentoring in just four months after implementing a peer-to-peer learning program for their new hires. With the new mentoring program in place, the new hires can speed more quickly, and training costs have decreased considerably. Mentoring provides a guided pathway to recruits for self-development and support to reach their full potential in the least amount of time. These programs, if done strategically, can also help in the easy and efficient redeployment of talent across teams.

2. Retaining and Engaging Talent

Employee retention has become a cause of great concern for large organizations today because two-thirds of America’s workforce are millennials. They believe that job-hopping is suitable for career progression. According to a Harvard Business Review report, high achievers in most large organizations cited lack of mentorship as a critical reason for leaving their posts. In another survey, 30% of millennials are open to job-hopping to gain new skills, and 31% of them would do so for higher compensation. Employees tend to stay longer with organizations, guiding them with their long-term career goals through structured mentoring and training. It makes employees feel that the company is investing not only in their professional but also their success.

3. Developing In-house Talent and Future Leaders

Mentoring programs at the managerial level help top management specifically target and train their managers into future leaders who embrace the company culture in their day-to-day work from an early stage and understand business requirements in a better way. Strategic mentoring and support help employees perform to the best of their abilities and promote their career succession. It results in enhanced ROI per employee for the employer.  

In this regard, KPMG has managed to engage their nurturing leaders from the pool of managers with their Leaders Engaging Leaders Program – where 60 top managers get paired with the senior leadership members like the management committee, board of directors, and national managing partners. With a structured mentoring program like this, KPMG encourages these 60 managers to learn directly from the leaders at the top level of the organization. It has helped KPMG identify talented managers who can take up more enormous responsibilities and step up to be leaders soon. It has helped many managers advance their careers in the organization, including one protégé promoted to the board of directors. While mentoring is an absolute necessity at the employee level, it also plays a significant part in developing managers into future leaders in the top management.

4. Communicating culture and knowledge sharing

With eight American adults reaching their retirement age every sixty seconds, a pressing concern for corporations today is to find qualified workers as replacements. In such situations, creating a channeled flow of knowledge and experience within the business becomes critical.  

AT&T has been successful in creating a unique mentorship platform called Leadership Circles. They use an online platform where one mentor can work closely with several mentees, sometimes even remotely. It is also supplemented by face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and webcasts.  

Mentoring provides a platform to openly share and retain knowledge within the organization and pave a way to create future leaders. High potential employees are usually the next generation of managers and leaders in an organization. They need to be nurtured and developed to fill in the gaps, maintain a streamlined flow of knowledge, and improve business performance.

If this post resonated with you, check with your organization to see whether you are part of the MentorCloud network. If not, sign up for a demo here! Our vision is to create a mentoring planet in which true equality is achieved, and hard work is rewarded, but it's only possible with your participation.

‍