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It’s crucial to demonstrate the impact of your mentorship program to your leadership team if you want to guarantee its longevity. If you can’t prove the ROI of mentorship, getting the budget to continue running the program will be an uphill battle.
Thankfully, you’re not alone in this.
In this article, we’ll share insights from several of our customers who’ve demonstrated impactful results from their mentorship programs.
Learning from other successful mentoring programs is the best way to make yours flourish. Ready to learn?
Let’s dive in!
What is the impact of workplace mentoring programs?
Almost all thriving professionals can point to at least one person who dedicated their time, energy and resources to ensure they succeeded career-wise.
By running your mentoring program, you’re making more of these career-changing relationships possible.
We have discussed the purpose of mentoring programs extensively elsewhere, we’ll highlight some impacts here.
- Improve onboarding of new employees: Research has shown that the first month of a new hire’s stay is critical to their staying long-term at the organization. Mentors will help them settle in and learn the ropes of the company. That’s why 56% of new employees want to connect with a mentor in their first week.
- Minimize rates of turnover: When you’re an ambitious employee and you have a mentor at work, your incentivized to grow where you are, rather than look elsewhere. A Deloitte survey in 2016 confirmed this, finding that “[t]hose intending to stay with their organization for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor (68 percent) than not (32 percent). Specifically, mentorship increases engagement, ais learning, promotes upward mobility, and more. We detail this in more detail in our article, Want to increase employee retention? Start a mentorship program.
- Discover and nurture leadership skills: Having a mentorship program keeps your employees learning and growing on the job. Nurturing them to be key players means that when a leadership position opens up, you don’t need to look outside. In this way, mentorship can be crucial for succession planning.
- Build a strong employee network: A mentorship program creates opportunities for employees to connect and build relationships across different levels and departments. In this way, mentorship fosters a culture of inclusivity and collaboration—a recipe for a great company culture.
Mentorship is a mutually beneficial relationship between mentors and mentees. But it also has a ripple effect across the organization.
To measure the impact of mentorship on your organization, check out our article on what metrics show the ROI of mentorship.
Let’s turn to look at some real examples of Together customers that have had fantastic results.
Examples of companies making an incredible impact through mentoring
Below, we share examples of companies with impactful mentoring programs. A quick overview of each company, followed by a description of their mentorship program and actionable lessons we’ve learned from them and shared with other program administrators.
1. AAA
AAA represents the American Automobile Association, a union of affiliated automobile clubs. It is an independent non-profit organization with over 60 million members in the United States and Canada.
Description of AAA’s mentorship program
AAA has an engagement and culture mentorship program on Together. Throughout their program, they’ve done an incredible job improving and maintaining a great workplace culture. Currently, their program is thriving, and they are planning an Evergreen program to make mentorship available to employees whenever they want it.
One particular practice that’s made AAA’s program such a success is that at the start of every cohort, they always have recipients of previous programs share their success stories. Recipients talk about their experiences and the impact of their programming.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
Testimonies are indeed powerful. There is nothing more inspiring for people than hearing the success stories of others. It has a way of propelling them into action. You should leverage reviews from past participants to sell your mentorship program. Just be prepared for more audience than you expected.
Crystal Black, Sr. L&D Specialist at AAA, talks about how mentorship is manifesting and driving outsized impact at their organization.
2. Canfor
Canfor is a leader in the supply of wood-based products in North America.
Description of Canfor’s mentorship program
Canfor is currently running an evergreen program where employees can join at any time and aren’t locked into a certain duration for their relationship. The Evergreen program is general for all employees. They plan on launching a new cohort program in May for the leaders and executives. Likewise, they also hope to run an employee resource group in the summer.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
They run a robust mentorship program judging from the number of users. A key practice we’ve learned from the admin of this program is that connecting 1-on-1 with participants as much as possible offers a lot of benefits. There are many ways to track and evaluate mentorship programs, but talking to those participating provides a more intimate level of understanding. If you want to understand how your program is performing, get out there and start talking to mentors and mentees.
3. Cooley
Cooley is a global law firm with branches in Asia, the United States and Europe with over 3,000 staff worldwide.
Description of Cooley’s mentorship program
Cooley uses Together for training new employees. Essentially, they’re running an onboarding program by integrating an existing buddies program into Together. They also run a group program for their Employee Resource Groups.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
You can run more than one mentorship program at the same time. It is easier to set up, run and manage different programs when you use mentoring software. What’s important, however, is that the programs have a clear purpose. They aren’t just to connect employees to learn. In Cooley’s case, it’s to accelerate onboarding and support female-identifying employees.
4. Electrolux
Electrolux Group is a foremost global appliance company. Their products include freezers, refrigerators, ovens, cookers, washing machines, dishwashers, air conditioners, air purifiers and small household appliances. They have roughly 51,000 employees worldwide.
Description of Electrolux’s mentorship programs
The North American and European arm of Electrolux run mentorship programs using Together. They have plans to merge both programs as the pilot phase was hugely successful and had a lot of positive feedback from participants.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
You can start off your mentorship program with smaller groups and then scale over time. The size of your company shouldn’t be an impediment to the learning and development of employees. Especially as personal and career development is one of the most important considerations of employees today. For large organizations, you can run your programs in cohort groups. There are mentorship program templates that can guide you in structuring and organizing a successful program.
5. Kellogg's
Kellogg's is a popular household brand headquartered in the United States. It is an American multinational food manufacturing company.
Description of Kellogg's mentorship program
Kellogg's has several diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, one of which is their mentorship program on Together. They are currently planning their second K-Nextions job shadowing program to assist their diverse employees in learning about other departments, including roles and functions. They also have an additional half dozen programs planned to launch this year.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
Multinationals are not left out of the wave of companies developing their employees through mentorship. They have seen exceptional results. They also realize that helping employees grow translates to a better organization in the long run. Engaged and happy employees lead to lower turnover, no matter the size of the company. Invest in your employees!
6. National Cybersecurity Alliance
The National Cybersecurity Alliance is a not-for-profit organization that was established in 2001. NCA advocates for the safe use of technology and how families and companies can protect themselves from cybercrimes.
Description of National Cybersecurity Alliance’s mentorship program
As mentioned above, NCA is a non-profit organization and has students as their mentees. Their current training is an evergreen program for approximately 200 participants with 92 active pairings. Their program administrators are working to streamline registration for students, as they are often holding out iPads for students to sign up at in-person events. The admins are dedicated and want to make the process easier and appealing to students, who are their primary targets.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
If your non-profit or organization offers training services, you can host them on a mentoring platform like Together. It will save you the cost of building an application from scratch. Together is customizable and integrable to suit your needs.
7. NetApp
NetApp is a company that offers IT services and consulting, headquartered in North America and Ireland.
Description of NetApp’s mentorship program
A training mentorship program has always been at the foundation of the summer intern training at NetApp. Building on the success they’ve seen in mentoring interns, they are planning to scale their mentorship program out to their global workforce with larger programs.
What does this mean for your mentoring program?
Here’s a company that recognizes the power of mentorship and leverages it. You can start small with a pilot program, scale a little and maintain that momentum. Or you could go big since there is a mentoring platform that can host you. Whatever you decide, mentoring should be in the works if you want to help your employees grow and move up the corporate ladder.
Drive impact with your mentoring program
In conclusion, implementing a mentorship program is a powerful way to drive impact across your organization.
Through mentorship, employees will develop new skills, gain valuable insights from more seasoned professionals, and form strong connections that span entire careers.
To make the most of your mentorship program, learn more about Together's mentorship software. With features such as automated matching, goal-setting, and progress tracking, Together makes it easy to manage and measure the success of your program.
Ready to launch an impactful mentoring program? Start here.
