Guide to Employee Mentoring

Set up employee mentoring to improve your employee retention rate
By Denise Brown

Mentoring in the workplace has been around for a long time, but many employers forget to use it to its full potential. In a typical mentoring situation, an experienced worker, often an administrator, works with a new member to help her learn the nuances of her new job. In other situations, an employee with a similar job helps the new employee find his niche in the business.

No matter which method you prefer, you can get employee mentoring help. Various businesses can either help you set up your employee mentoring program, or can supervise it to the point of assigning mentors to protégés.

With any employee mentoring program, there are a number of expectations that come with the mentoring relationship. They include:

1. A level of trust between both the mentor and protégé. This must develop for the employee mentoring relationship to work.

2. Both individuals must be willing to meet to discuss whatever issues may arise.

3. The mentor and protégé must both keep any commitments they make to one another.

Action Steps

The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Find employee mentoring information to develop a program There are a number of books available to give you the basics of setting up your own employee mentoring program. These books cover how to set up a program, how to maintain a program, and how to evaluate its effectiveness.

I recommend: The National Staff Development Council offers a simple report that outlines steps for setting up an employee mentoring program. Coaching and Mentoring for Dummies by Marti Brounstein gives a good overview of how to develop an employee mentoring program. Getting Started with Mentoring: A Practical Guide to Setting up an Inclusive Mentoring Initiative, a book put out by the Novations Group, can serve as a guide to help set up an employee mentoring formula for your business.

Participate in online employee mentoring programs These can be a quick way to get you and your employees connected as mentors and protégés. Some programs are quite cost effective.

I recommend: Management Mentors offers an online program, “Mentoring Success: Maximizing Your Mentoring Experience,” to introduce both mentor and protégé to all aspects of employee mentoring. Mentor Scout offers employee mentoring advice to match mentors and protégés through their online service. Peer Mentoring provides a workshop that helps you develop a peer mentoring program in your business.

Purchase employee mentoring products to help you get your program started While these may seem expensive at first glance, all the materials are available to get your programs started literally out of the box. This can save you a lot of time in the long run. Each program does allow you to make alterations to suit your needs.

I recommend: Training Evolution offers mentor training in a box. It includes everything you need to develop employee mentoring, as well as evaluate how effective it is. Quality Media Resources centers their mentoring products on a 26-minute video presentation. You receive other employee mentoring information with the kit as well.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

Whether you set up peer mentoring or administrative mentoring, don't expect the same person to continually be a mentor. This does involve extra work for the mentor, for which they may not receive extra pay. At the successful conclusion of a training period for any protégé, it's always a good idea to reward the protégé and the mentor as well.