How to Start a Mentoring Program? (Free Checklist)

Research by Linkedin's Workplace Learning Report shows that mentorship was the number one priority for L&D professionals. With the many advantages mentoring programs bring to mentors, mentees, and the organisation, it’s no wonder many are investing in this initiative. 

If you work in HR, you may have already seen the numbers and how beneficial mentoring can be. You might be considering starting a mentoring program or scaling an existing program however you’re worried about where to start and how much work will be involved.

Without mentoring software, running a mentoring program can be time-consuming and challenging. It can be overwhelming to think about managing numerous registrants, matching pairs manually, training the mentors, providing conversation topics and nudges and reporting on the success of these pairs, all whilst performing other work duties. Fortunately, you can now automate most of these steps with mentoring software.

Whether you have mentoring software or not, this checklist has been written to ensure you know how to start a mentoring program for your organisation. We’ll also offer a downloadable checklist that you can use to make sure you’re following the steps correctly. 

Why You Should Start a Mentoring Program in Your Organisation?

HR.com’s Mentoring in the Workplace 2022 white paper detailed the different reasons why organisations initiated a mentoring program. These reasons include the following: 

• To develop leadership skills
• To increase employee engagement
• To improve employees’ skill levels
• To support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives

These are just a few of the benefits that organisations get when they kick-start a mentoring program of their own. Through mentorship, mentors gain a sense of self-worth and fulfilment in their role. At the same time, mentees develop skills, confidence and career support by talking to someone confidentially about their challenges, and aspirations, and sharing knowledge. 

If you’re still looking for a reason why you need to have a mentoring program in your organisation, you can read this. 

5 Steps to Launch Your Own Mentoring Program

Follow these five steps to launch your mentoring program with ease. If you’re not sure where to start, this checklist will guide you through each phase of the mentorship program management.

Step 1: Identify Your Goals

Before launching a mentoring program, it’s important to identify the organisation’s goals. You can do that by answering these questions: 

• Is your employee engagement low?
• Does your organisation lack diversity?
• Are your talented employees leaving? 
• What do you hope to gain out of mentoring? 
• What will the participants of the program get at the end? 

An effective mentoring program can support your initiatives in improving employee morale by giving them more support, connection and an improved workplace environment. You’ll be better equipped to check your return on investment (ROI) by identifying your goals in starting a mentoring program. 

When identifying your goals, it is important to engage key stakeholders, influencers and decision-makers to ensure you have their buy-in into the mentoring program. One of the biggest predictors of mentoring program success is whether there is strong executive leadership support/sponsorship.

Step 2: Promote to Employees

The next step involves a series of promotional activities to let employees know of the existence of a mentorship program. One way to do this is to build excitement over the program. You can entrust a leader to perform this by asking them to communicate the program’s benefits and a personal story about what mentoring means to them.

Another option is to get early adopters or encourage thought leaders in the organisation to become mentors. This should excite employees to be among the first to join the mentoring program. Once they are satisfied with the outcome of the mentoring program, they will likely spread the word to their colleagues and friends in their department. This will encourage others to grow curious about the program and participate in it too. 

Like any new workplace initiative, a communications plan should be developed to ensure the recruitment of mentees and mentors is a seamless process. Brancher can assist by providing a pre-written communications plan for your organisation.

Step 3: Match Mentors and Mentees

After creating enough buzz and excitement around the mentoring program, your next step is to match mentors and mentees. For some, this might be the most exciting part of the process. But if you’re working for a large organisation, this can be stressful and even turn into a logistical nightmare. 

Aside from carefully matching mentors and mentees to ensure they are a great fit, you have to monitor their progress to see how often they are meeting together and whether anyone needs additional support. Once you have over 10 - 20 pairs in your program, matching and support can be an incredibly time-consuming process. It also becomes almost impossible to ensure everyone finds their ideal match when managing the pairs manually. There’s also a risk of making poor pairing decisions due to unconscious bias. Many mentoring programs have failed because of this.

The good news is that mentoring software now exists to make the pairing process more efficient and effective. Brancher’s mentoring platform uses an evidence-based algorithm that pairs mentors and mentees based on attitudes and values, as well as skills, goals and more By using this software, you get to save time and resources on making pairings manually. 

If you do not have access to any mentoring software, we recommend you still ask mentees and mentors some key questions to understand their motivation/goals, skills and areas of interest so you can pair them effectively.

Step 4: Provide Support to Paired Mentors and Mentees

Many program coordinators match mentees and mentors and make the mistake of thinking their job is done. Without ongoing support, training and check-ins, mentoring relationships will fade. Mentoring coordinators need to support pairs to make sure the relationship becomes a success throughout their mentoring journey. This can be done by doing the following:

• Provide learning resources and/or training
• Assist mentees with goal setting and preparation for their mentoring meetings
• Check how often pairs are meeting and assist if needed
• Resolve any mentoring relationship issues
• Send out a survey to gather anonymous feedback
• Adjust the program based on this feedback (where appropriate) and report on key metrics of success

Upon the start of a mentoring relationship, participants should establish a Mentoring Agreement, which serves as the basis for how they plan to accomplish their goals. As the administrator, if there are any relationship issues, this Mentoring Agreement can be referred back to (to clarify any misaligned expectations).

Many mentoring relationships start strong, but then for whatever reason, they tend to fade. Your role as the mentoring coordinator is to keep these relationships alive and strong. Mentoring software can also help to provide support and automate most of these steps, including training, surveys, check-ins, nudges, and support.

Step 5: Evaluate the Mentoring Program’s Progress

Finally, it is the role of the program administrator to evaluate and report back to key stakeholders on program success. You will need to continually check whether the participants of the program are actively participating in it and what they have achieved since the first meeting.

To help make the job easier, Brancher has a series of tools available on the platform to evaluate the progress of each mentoring pair. The administrator can use these tools to get qualitative information on whether the program is working or if something needs to be changed. 

As such, it is important for the administrator to check the progress of each pairing throughout the whole experience and not at the end. A successful mentoring program should be monitored continuously and supported along the way. 

When is the Right Time to Start a Mentoring Program?

One of the best things about working with Brancher is that you can start your mentoring program anytime. If you’re unsure about whether a mentoring program is right for you or your organisation, contact us for a no-obligation discovery call. In this session, we can help to explore your organisational goals and context and recommend whether a mentoring program will genuinely add value.

Call us today to schedule a demo and see why organisations like the Ai Group, Women With Disabilities Australia, and the Government of South Australia have chosen to use our mentoring platform. We’d love to support your team too! 

Sources:

1. HR.com. (2022, June). Mentoring in the Workplace 2022: Use mentoring programs to develop leadership, engage employees, and improve organizational performance. https://www.hr.com/en/resources/free_research_white_papers/mentoring-in-the-workplace-2022-report_l3wmxpny.html

2. LinkedIn. (2023). The LinkedIn Learning 2023 Workplace Learning Report: Building the agile future. https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/pdfs/workplace-learning-report/LinkedIn-Learning_Workplace-Learning-Report-2023-EN.pdf