We’ve spent a lot of time working with program administrators to craft a mentoring program for their organisation. This is why it’s important to get as many participants to be part of the mentoring program. If you are wondering how you can increase mentoring engagement, here are some tips on how you can encourage others to join in on your mentoring program.
How to Increase Mentoring Engagement in Your Organisation
A well-structured mentoring program offers more than just professional development—it fosters growth, collaboration, and innovation within the workplace. Mentoring provides participants with valuable opportunities to learn from experienced colleagues, gain new perspectives, and build meaningful relationships. For mentees, it offers tailored guidance and support, helping them to navigate challenges and achieve career goals. For mentors, it’s a chance to share knowledge, sharpen leadership skills, and contribute to the growth of the organisation.
This collective progress strengthens teams, boosts engagement, and drives organisational success. Encouraging participation is key to unlocking this potential and ensuring that both mentors and mentees feel supported and empowered on their professional journeys. Here’s how you can encourage your members to be part of the program:
Gain Support from Program Sponsors
Knowing that your organisation’s leaders support the mentoring program can be a big help in ensuring employees are engaged in the program. Through the experiences of senior leaders in the organisation, employees get to learn how they can benefit from mentoring and stay committed to their journey.
A good practice is to secure support from executives before officially launching the program. After that, you can record videos of the leaders showing their support to the mentoring program and invite employees to participate.
Offer Gamification
Gamification is a highly effective way to drive engagement. While we’d all like to think we’re naturally motivated, the reality is that immediate rewards can often help people stay on track. Mentoring relationships take time to flourish, and the benefits accumulate over time, so gamification can provide short-term gratification to maintain momentum.
We offer a gamification system that gives participants a leadership score on how well they’ve taken part in the program. When you kickstart your program, you can encourage participants to take part in this gamification system and see who the leaders are. Eventually, they’ll begin to see the benefits of mentoring and continue participating organically.
Share Success Stories
When people see the value in mentoring, they will likely engage with it. As a program administrator, you can promote the mentoring program by sharing success stories that others have gone through. This will give your employees something to look forward to as part of their positive growth.
Provide Valuable Resources to Participants
Another way you can encourage employees to be part of the mentoring program is to showcase your resources section. These are valuable tools that can help them throughout the mentoring process. While they engage in these learning resources with their paired mentors or mentees, these resources can also help teach them a thing or two about themselves.
Brancher has a wealth of resources available in our platform. You can share these with your mentors and mentees to help their mentoring journey become a breeze.
Conduct Regular Check-Ins
One of the biggest challenges that program administrators deal with when conducting a program manually is that they have endless paperwork to go through, especially in large organisations. When working with a mentoring software, you get the assistance you need in monitoring your mentoring pairs. This allows you to free up your time to handle more important things in your organisation.
Additionally, having access to the Brancher dashboard allows you to see real-time information about each mentoring pair. You’ll be able to regularly check-in with each couple and guide them through their mentoring journey instead of only doing the check-ins at the start and end.
Make Sure Participants Know They Can Reach Out
It’s important that participants know they can ask for help if needed. If they don’t know how to access support, they might feel overwhelmed and drop out. Ensure they know how to reach you and make this information easy to find.
At its core, mentoring is about building meaningful human connections. While tracking data and metrics is essential, it’s important not to lose sight of the relationships being formed and the life-changing impacts of mentoring. When you know how to put your employees first, they will realise how important mentoring can be in their career growth.
Call Brancher today to see the dashboard in action and how you can increase mentoring engagement with these tools.