Mentoring has long been proven an effective strategy for developing leaders. Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great, Maya Angelou mentored Oprah Winfrey, and Socrates mentored Plato.
Mentoring software wasn't available during Aristotle and Socrates' time, so not everyone had the opportunity to find a mentor. Mentoring software now makes mentoring accessible and allows organisations to scale the benefits of mentoring across their organisation. This article explores the benefits of mentoring software for administrators within organisations..
How Does Mentoring Software Help Program Administrators
We've previously established why organisations need mentoring and discussed the benefits for mentors. However, we haven't focused on how mentoring software can aid the person running the program within an organisation.
Without software, program administrators must handle tasks manually, spending countless hours ensuring everything runs smoothly. They face significant pressure to manage various responsibilities: matching mentors and mentees, resolving conflicts, measuring program success, reporting ROI, and more.
Managing a mentoring program can quickly become a full-time job. There's also the risk of biased pairings, leading to failed mentoring relationships. Investing in mentoring software can automate these processes and reduce the admin burden, improve matching satisfaction, and enable you to scale mentoring benefits to more people.
6 Mentoring Software Benefits for Administrators
We've outlined why program administrators need mentoring software, but here are six specific benefits they gain from using it:
1. Eliminates Unconscious Bias 🎯
Manually matching mentees and mentors can introduce unconscious bias, especially when dealing with large groups. Despite efforts to remain impartial, mistakes can occur. An admin can easily assume that someone who works in Finance wants to be paired with someone in Finance, when they may actually want a mentor in the Strategy division. Brancher uses a science-based matching algorithm to recommend the best possible matches based on unique criteria and predictors of "match chemistry" for successful relationships.
Brancher offers three mentor-matching options:
- Admin-Driven: Administrators match users based on suggestions from our AI algorithm.
- User-Driven: Users select a mentor from recommended options highlighted by the AI algorithm.
- Hybrid: Users self-match for a set period, after which administrators ensure everyone is matched by a specific date.
While perfect matches can't be guaranteed every time, Brancher provides evidence-based matches with an average satisfaction rate of over 90%, with some customers achieving 100%.
2. Reduces the Administration Burden
Brancher reduces the administration burden and time saved by over 80%. For example, a recent Brancher customer saved over 300 hours in the first three months purely due to Brancher’s mentoring software and implementation team streamlining all design and implementation. Check out Brancher’s ROI and time-saving calculator.
3. Ability to Scale Benefits
Without Brancher’s mentoring software, mentoring programs are often limited to a small group of individuals in the organisation. This is because it’s too hard to increase the number of pairings manually. With mentoring software, you can extend the benefits of mentoring to everyone in the organisation, allowing anyone to participate and maximising employee engagement, connection and retention outcomes.
4. Visibility of Real-Time Success Measures
Without Brancher, mentoring administrators need to wait to survey to evaluate success. Brancher’s mentoring software provides administrators with real-time data insights and analytics. This allows program administrators to track leading success measures such as the number of pairs, pairing and meeting frequency satisfaction and training completion. They can also see goal achievement and organisational outcomes such as collaboration, engagement and retention. The data enables informed decisions when reporting to sponsors and identifying areas for improvement.
5. Proactive rather than Reactive
Mentoring software enables administrators to proactively manage mentoring relationships rather than reactively manage mentoring issues or complaints. With Brancher’s software, mentoring administrators have visibility over each participant’s satisfaction with their mentoring partner and mentoring meetings. If someone is dissatisfied with their mentoring meeting, the administrator can be alerted and if appropriate, reach out to proactively manage any concerns. Without this software, the administrator is blind to these issues and only finds out when it’s too late, often at the end of a program.
6. More satisfied mentees and mentors
Mentoring software provides mentees and mentors with many features that enable them to make the most of their relationships including but not limited to:
- Goal setting
- E-learning modules
- Tracking of conversation starters and actions
- Scheduling meetings
- Private notes and shared notes
- Mentoring tasks
How Brancher Mentoring Software Supports Program Admins
In conclusion, mentoring software helps program administrators run successful programs while allowing them to focus on other tasks. The software reduces costs and saves time and effort for administrators. Benefits can also be scaled to more people, resulting in greater outcomes for staff and the organisation.
To see how much you can save with mentoring software, check out Brancher’s time and dollar savings calculator. You can also read our ROI of mentoring article to learn more about our ROI calculators.