Employee Deployment and Retention
Putting a Mentoring Program Into Place
By Julie Gerstein
Feb 2, 2006, 12:54

Formal mentor programs foster relationships between junior and senior employees within your office. The goal of a mentoring program is to increase productivity, employee engagement and employee retention.

Mentoring is typically done in a one-on-one basis with more seasoned employs serving as mentors for new employees. Mentors are available to address new employee questions or concerns. In addition to helping assimilate new employees to the corporate culture, mentors can also help them more quickly tackling your company’s learning curve. Successful mentoring relationships blossom as trust is built, and can go a long way to make someone feel like they’re a productive part of the team.

Mentoring is not just for new employees. Consider pairing an employee someone who's rapidly advancing with a more senior manager.

In order to implement a formal mentoring program, you’ll want to:

• Identify the individuals who you believe need mentoring.
• Identify the individuals you believe will be able to provide mentoring services.
• Determine what you would like the program to accomplish. Do you want your program to be ongoing, or would you prefer that the mentoring be situation specific?
• Determine how often mentors and mentees will meet and how long the mentoring matches should last.
• Determine where the mentors will meet. Can your mentors and mentees have a dedicated time each week to meet to discuss issues, or should most mentoring take place outside of the workplace, or via e-mail?

Establishing a successful mentoring requires significant contributions from the company as well as participating employees. The rewards of higher productivity and employee retention will be in proportion to your investment.


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