Like your gadget needs regular updating, so do the employees in your office. Mentoring and updating your employees with new techniques and skills are an integral part of any organization to grow. Companies or organizations that regularly keep mentoring their young employees, motivating them to try new skill-sets prevent them from job-hopping.
According to the Deloitte Millennial survey published in Forbes, 63% of millennials said their leadership skills were not fully developed. And those who were willing to stay in the organization for more than five years were more likely to have a mentor.
Therefore it should be right to say, if you fail to mentor your employees the right way, you lose them. These effective mentorship programs will help you mentor your employees in a better manner.
Types of Effective Mentorship Programs
One on one Mentoring
The one-on-one mentoring program focuses on building relationships and enhancing individual skill-sets. In these programs, your employees have to decide their pairs voluntarily. The employees also decide on the topic of discussion. You have to make your employees track their own hours and performance goals to benefit from the mentorship programs.
Situational Mentoring
Such mentorship programs help train new employees in adapting to the company’s working styles. You want to train your new employees on how to use a platform or system. In this case, you pair them with your old groomed employees who can mentor them.
Developmental Mentoring
This is a long-term mentoring process. It involves people from higher designations to train an employee to take their positions later. It is always beneficial for your organization to have an employee at a managerial level who has been promoted over the years then hiring someone new. This is a kind of mentoring which takes time, a slow and steady process.
Reverse Mentoring
It is not always that only people at a senior level can be mentors. A newly hired employee in your organization possesses some extraordinary skills. These skills are highly beneficial for your organization. In such a case, they can also become a mentor. This concept proves to be useful because your employees get to learn a completely new set of skill-set which were not followed or thought about to date.
Group Mentoring
Group mentoring is one way of making strong ties in your organization. This is mainly used while implementing situational learning. Your newly hired employees are divided into groups and are paired with either one or more mentors. They learn the process in a group and their discussions and suggestions can prove valuable for your organization.
Peer Mentoring
This is also a part of group mentoring. However, in this type of mentoring, sometimes, a mentor is not needed. The peers come in groups and mentor their fellow workers on new trends and techniques. This helps them in honing new skills and advancing their career paths without having a proper mentor.
Things to take care of
However, while using these types of mentorship programs in your organization, you need to take care of the following points.
- Mentoring partnerships should contribute to the organization's business strategies and policies.
- Mentors and Mentees should not be in a direct reporting relationship
- A mentorship program is effective only when the mentor and mentees both participate in this process.
- Mentees should keep in mind that their managers are reported from time to time about the progress of their mentoring programs.
- Mentoring partnerships are grounded in confidentiality. The organization and the mentorship partners should keep it on priority.
- The effectiveness of the mentorship program should be monitored from time to time. This is to ensure that your employees are benefitting from the same.
Like Michelle Obama says, ‘Success isn’t about how the money you make. It is about the difference you make in people’s lives.” And, effective mentoring makes a difference not only in your life but also in the lives of your employees. This, in turn, benefits your organization.