Building a mentoring program is more than just matching more experienced employees with less experienced ones.
Building a mentoring program is more than just matching more experienced employees with less experienced ones. In fact, thinking about mentoring programs as making simple one-to-one matches via complicated spreadsheets is actually pretty outdated.
To create a program your employees love and want to participate in as both mentors and mentees, you'll have to update your thinking. Here are a few starters:
Learn from past mistakes (if you have some to learn from)
If your organization had a mentor program that didn't quite work or is no longer as effective as it once was, that’s a good place to start.
Was it difficult to recruit mentees or mentors? Was the mentor program too unstructured? Did participants experience little benefit after investing their time in the program? Mentorship isn’t one size fits all, but busy HR teams don’t have bandwidth to build a bespoke program for each individual (and even if they did, that doesn’t scale).
Figuring out why a past effort didn't work can help you anticipate issues you might experience in the future. It can also help you engage employees by considering their input or feedback. Especially if current employees are skeptical of your efforts for a new program, getting them on board by asking them about their past negative experiences will help instill faith in this new program.