Transforming Healthcare Through Mentorship

I'm really excited to be hosting this incredible panel where we're going to be diving into kind of the nitty-gritty of mentorship programs, how they're run, how they started, and also the impact of they've had on employee development in growth.

We're joined here by a great panel.

Unfortunately, we did have a third panel, but due to some technical difficulties, We're hosting Anne-Marie and Beth from UNICEF and Teledoc Health, respectively.

We've got a full hour for this session, which we'll cover some preset questions where we'll again be diving into the mentorship programs, again, how they run, how they started, the strategy behind them and how they integrate with employee learning and development.

But then towards the end, we'll also have some audience Q&A.

So if you have any questions for the panelists, or about mentorship generally, we'll be accepting those questions at the end.

And if they are relevant during the conversation as well, We'll ask those in line with the questions that we have set up for today.

In terms of the Q&A, we have on the right side, of the screen you'll see there's chat and q and an if you have questions I just ask that you ask them there this way we'll be able to track them and see them and make sure that we get an answer for your question.

Even if you don't have questions, you can go in there, you can upvote them, and we will be answering the ones with the most interest behind them.

And lastly, this session is recorded.

We will be sending out a recording afterward, and it will be hosted on the Together website.

So in case you miss anything or want to share this out, there will be recording for that.

So I'm really excited today to host this wonderful panel that we have of incredible learning and development and human resources, professionals and experts in their field.

I'm joined here today by Anne-Marie Gallo, a human resources officer at UNICEF, a global organization whose mission is to provide humanitarian developmental aid to children in need around the globe.

Among many other things, Anne-Marie's primary responsibility is for supporting the implementation and strategy of mentorship around the entire global employee network at UNICEF.

We're also joined by Beth Clark.

Beth is a senior manager of learning and development at Teledoc, a telehealth service which provides essential care and services around the globe.

Best team helps run several L&D initiatives, one of which is their main, sorry, their mentorship program, which you played a role in formalizing and starting from its inception.

So Anne-Marie Beth, thank you both for joining us today.

Before we get into the questions, anything you'd like to say to the audience?

Thanks for having us.

I'm excited to share a little bit more about what we've learned over the last couple of years implementing our mentorship program.

Amazing.

Excited to be here to learn more from Beth and if there's any good questions.

It's been an exciting journey, so excited to share.

Amazing.

Awesome.

So with that, we'll watch into the first question and just at a very high level, what challenges are you leveraging mentorship to overcome within your organization?

And Anne, I'll let you kick this one off first.

Sure.

So a bit about UNICEF, as you know, we're a global organization.

We have, we work in over 190 countries.

Our workforce is massive with over 20,000 people.

We have so many focus areas, child protection and inclusion, education, gender, emergencies.

So one of the challenges we have such a big organization is that we tend to work in silos.

And so with mentorship, one of the things we want to do is to really allow our staff to work constructionally and having those conversations and the mentorship is allowing for that.

We are also, because of our size and the very, very many different contract types, from interns to consultants to full-time staff, we tend to have a lot of hierarchies.

So another challenge we have is trying to break those down.

And mentorship is one of the ways we're trying to do that.

And also because of the size, we want to make sure that our staff, even if you're in a small country office, can have an opportunity to network with some of the different offices, whether it's HQ or regionally.

So just trying to connect our colleagues across the world is one of the things we're using mentorship for.

Amazing, amazing.

And just to perhaps double tap into that, this might be an obvious answer for some people, but what really is the value of that connection?

I think the value of the connection is that a lot of times when we have emergencies or in different countries have different sort of challenges they're facing.

A lot of these things don't exist in a vacuum and it's so important to have those cross relationships, not only in different locations, but in different functions, because we find that when we're able to really network and collaborate, it does allow us to better, better, um, deliver on the results for children.

And so I think that's one of the things.

It's just not just networking to network, but networking to really learn from each other.

And sometimes because it's so big, we find that multiple people may be doing multiple things.

Some are doing it better, some not.

So just being able to get those best practices from each other has been a really, really big game changer.

Amazing, amazing.

And Beth, how is this contrasted or compared to the situation at Teledoc?

It's very similar.

Our organization is much smaller.

We're around the 6,000 mark, but we also are very global.

So we have businesses across the globe.

And some of the same things.

We're trying to build connection with people, break down silos within our organization, whether that being here in the US or that being at breaking down silos that are happening across the globe.

We really have been trying to build a program that is allowing for the development of more organic connections.

So after the pandemic, we still haven't gone back into the office.

So the majority of our employees are still remote.

And so that organic connection that happens at the water cooler when you are in the office is not happening.

And so we wanted to make sure that we were able to create something that allowed for that to still happen and for those connections to be established.

So a lot of what we are doing is really focusing around kind of building a network for employees and making sure that they know that there are other people doing similar things to them.

Or people are maybe doing something that is completely different from them, but they can learn so much from another person who's either in a different state or in a different country or maybe in the same location as them.

But they just don't know kind of who they are.

So that's really what we've been using and leveraging kind of mentorship for within our organization.

Amazing.

Awesome.

So great responses, really looking at that.

Connection piece with a focus on the knowledge sharing and how that actually impacts the work that's delivered, the quality of it, and the impact and the results that it drives.

Is that right?

Perfect.

Amazing.

So I want to pivot a little bit more granular as well, too.

So we've talked about what you're using mentorship to hopefully achieve and overcome.

Can you tell us a little bit about your program?

So getting into the details, what they look like.

And Beth, love for you to take this one.

Yeah, so our program is what we call Evergreen.

So if you are familiar with the Together platform, that's one of the models that you can use.

So it really allows people to be able to come and go from the program when kind of the need strikes for them.

So they're able to join a program.

It's not a cohort-based program.

They can join the network at any point in time.

So that has been the model that we've chosen to go with.

It is open to our entire global population.

One thing that we see as a huge opportunity for us is translations.

So being able to implement translations within the tool and the system to be able to increase our global participation.

Right now we still have global participation, even if it being only English.

But we know that's a huge opportunity for us and something that we will be investing in into 2025.

From a like matching criteria and how we've set it up, we have opportunities for mentors, mentees, and also Colleague Connect.

So people to be able to connect with those who are at a similar level to them within the organization.

It is user led.

So we as the admins, we're not pairing people unless there's kind of an extraneous circumstance.

But most of this is user-led.

And we have a program that's really set to optimist.

We have some connection issues there.

We'll just, and if you, and Marie, if you would like to kind of take it off as we kind of resolve some of the technical issues with Beth.

So what kind of is the chief level person within our organization?

So that's just helped us manage and helped also our leadership team kind of manage their time with lots of people wanting to be able to connect with them.

So that's a great feature of the tool that allows for us to set that, and we don't have to be managing that from an administrative perspective.

Participants also need to be able to pair with someone who's speaking the same language.

So that's a required field that we have set.

They must be speaking the same language to connect.

And then everything else is just set to optimize based off of skills and goal alignment between the two people that are looking to connect.

So that's how we have set up our program thus far.

Amazing.

And sorry, Beth, yeah, I think you cut out there just before you got into the skills matching the language overlaps.

Could you just briefly recover that part of?

Yeah, sorry about that.

So we have set within the organization some parameters around levels of who can connect within the tool.

So say we have someone who's signed up to as an individual contributor, they won't have the ability to connect with someone who's more at a chief level.

So it allows for our leadership team to not have to say, hey, sorry, I don't have the time.

I don't have the capacity to be able to connect with you.

But allows it so that they don't even get those..

Pairs kind of served up to them.

They're going to be connecting with other people.

They would still be able to connect with someone who's like a senior manager within the organization.

But it allows for us to just set those parameters around the program.

It allows for our leadership team to not have to kind of feel as if they have to say no to people.

And it also eliminates some of the requests that different levels within the organization are getting.

Knowing that we have a huge user base of people who really can support, and also have the capacity to be able to support all levels within the organization.

Yeah, yeah, and that's something we often see as well too with open programs where they have those seniority call them caps, where, yeah, the CEO is not going to be mentoring an intern in order to get the most out of the development benefits, looking at, you know, how can people make, you know, one move up?

It's best that they're connected with someone who is, has been through that path.

And so by setting those limits, we've often seen people kind of control the program and make sure that it truly is valuable and beneficial to everyone.

So thank you for that.

And Marie, I know with..

UNICEF, it is such a large organization, and you have a very, very, a very kind of like unique structure to it.

Can you tell us a little bit about the mentorship programs that you're running in UNICEF, what that looks like and, and how it's distributed over the organization?

Yeah.

So because of the size of our organization, we decided to go with an approach that has multiple, many different smaller programs.

And so each program has different goals and a different target audience.

An example would be our next-gen program.

So a program like this targets our young units of staff, and we call those staff members who are 35 and under, and they only make up around 11% of our total workforce.

So I think it's an important one to really try to make sure that we are seeing these staff members and making them feel welcome and included and encourage them to stay within the organization.

And we match them with more senior colleagues.

And so this is a global program across all of our seven regions.

So that's one of our programs.

And then we go into more regional-specific programs.

So for example, we have a program that's just for our region in East and Southern Africa.

Then we have another one for East Asia and the Pacific.

We have another program for our South Asia region.

And then we have an employee resource group for our Latin American staff.

And they have their own program.

And just because of the size of the organization, we found that doing it this way worked a little bit better for us.

Also, because a lot of our mentorship programs, we have what we call upskilling that go along with the mentorship relationships.

So before every program, we have an onboarding session.

And then throughout, depending on the program, we'll have the different webinars.

So for an example, this would be maybe a webinar on DEI.

A webinar on innovation, a webinar on the growth mindset.

So in addition to the..

Mentoring relationships.

We also want to make sure that they have this learning journey, and we have meetings where mentors come together, and they can just network by themselves.

And mentees can also build the network not just with their mentor, but also with their peers and other people who are mentees there.

Something else we've just started exploring is group mentorship.

So we have our female leaders in Venezuela, and they will be our first time trying this because we found that we asked them, what are you looking for in mentorship?

And from what they told us, we thought group mentorship would work very well for building that confidence, that privacy, that security, that network.

So we're trying that with our leaders in Venezuela.

So in addition to that, another thing we also focus on is functional areas.

So one of the ones we're trying to work on now is one for our staff in human resources and people in culture.

For people who want to maybe focus specifically and grow for someone in that scene functional area.

So we've been doing all these different programs and what we've done mostly is the cohort based.

Because it allows us to really plan on a learning around that.

So you come in, you have your onboarding, you have different learnings, we..

UNICEF, we really try to focus on recognition.

So making sure at the end we have a celebration certificate and all these different kind of things.

So cohort based has worked really well for that.

But something that we do want to work on, and we're thinking of in futures having an organizational evergreen because we do see the value in that.

But we're just trying to figure out what is the best way for us to go about that, given the size of organizations, and all the different needs of the staff.

So the platform has really allowed us to be able to have so many different programs going at the same time.

And we're able to go in and track and see the numbers, see who's registered.

See what regions are not working or so the platform has really allowed us to scale up in that way.

Amazing.

Yeah, so much there to kind of like chew on and talk about so many different programs, but one of the core, I think, differences between Beth, the programs that you're running at Teledoc Health and Amory, the programs that you're running at.

UNICEF is one in UNICEF, like they're very focused.

They're very, um, again regional specific function specific or even that employee lifecycle stage specific with the young employees cohort based as well too whereas Beth, you're taking on a little bit of a different approach, right, with the open, evergreen, very employee-led, organic and flexible as well, too.

So I'm really excited to kind of like dive into the nuances of these programs and how they've kind of impacted the employees and how they've also helped kind of like progress the organizational goals, your team's goals, and the employee development overall, which kind of brings me to the next question that um I have here and that is about uh the impact of mentorship uh on skills and um if there have also been like other areas that you've seen uh kind of growth or improvements in across the employee life cycle.

So really, what role has mentorship played in improving or building skills within the organization?

And I think Anne-Marie, I'll have you kick this one-off.

So we try to always look at things like our, we send out the global staff surveys, and we try to see what are areas people are struggling with, things like that.

And a lot of it, it desops.

Skills around speaking up, managing upwards, all these different kind of topics.

So in our mentoring, that is something that we really try to focus on, not just in the sense we together platform provides really, really good learning within the agendas.

But we also try to make sure we're including things in there, things that communicating across cultures, having difficult conversations, having performance conversations.

And these sort of sorts skills, and we have only sort of been going, doing mentorship at this level for around a year or two now.

So we don't have the hard quantitative data.

However, just from the feedback, we always ask the questions, you know, what do you want to learn?

What are things you want to improve?

When we get to the end, and we do that final survey, and they come and say, oh, I feel a lot more confident.

I'm talking more in meetings.

I'm applying for that job I wouldn't have otherwise.

I'm setting up that networking meeting with this senior chief.

So that sort of feedback is letting us know that something we're doing is working in the program.

And so that has been..

Benefit we're seeing to our staff members.

We're a staff member who was based in our South Sudan office and his mentor was based in Copenhagen.

And their relationship ended, but the mentor emails us and let us know, hi, we actually..

They were visiting, and we've connected, and they're no longer in UNICEF, but they said how much this benefited them, and they applied for this other job.

Seeing that has been a really, really good positive reinforcement for keeping and really driving mentorship forward.

We are seeing people who maybe started in one functional area, and you have a mentor in another.

And just because, let's say, you're doing HR, you can explore effort, operations or program.

So it's been an opportunity to have people to learn more about a functional area that they're not in and to see what that person maybe doesn't understand it and to see it's a possible way to move laterally or up.

Even if it's not within your functional area.

So that's, I think, one of the things we've also been seeing.

So we don't, we are not able to really measure.

And also, after a few years, we'll be able to maybe measure impact a little bit more.

But this sort of feedback that we're getting from staff saying, you know, I, and we have our Beaver Engage previously Yammer groups where they go in, and they can network with each other and they talk.

So just knowing that a mentor or mentor has left the program with, you know, 50 new people in the network that didn't have before.

I feel like that's a huge game changer.

Because of UNICEF's global scale, we also have what we call mobility.

And it's really just staff members moving from one decision to another, from emergency to a and we see people who maybe were a national staff who want to be international and saying, oh, I want to be mobile and move here.

And for us to keep working and delivering the results the way we do.

Mobility is a huge part of our organization.

And mentorship really, really helps with that.

If we can help, connect colleagues, especially with somebody whose maybe where they want to work and understanding that and understanding how to navigate it.

And the UN is also..

Quite not just UN system, it's quite a complex dynamic organization.

So just having a mentor who can help you and just sort of guide you and give you tips on how to navigate that has been really crucial for our staff members.

Even those who've been here for a very long time, you know, someone else comes in, and they navigate it a bit differently.

So just giving staff members these opportunities to network and talk has helped a lot.

And we see it and the feedback we get in our surveys and from the emails we get as well.

Yeah.

And Beth, how is that compared to contrast or is similar to the situation at Teledoc Health, how is it impacted skills or have there been other benefits to the program as well that you've observed?

Yeah, I think very similar observations within our organization as well.

I think the majority of people when it comes to skills are focusing kind of on those soft skills with their mentor.

We are seeing a lot of people who also are coming to us after the fact and just saying like, having the ability to connect with someone in this other department and learning about what they do every day is so incredibly impactful to them.

A lot of people are coming into this.

Trying to learn about mobility, right, within the, within the organization.

They want to grow here.

They want to grow within our business, but they don't necessarily know kind of what's out there.

They haven't had the opportunity to, work with someone who's maybe in finance or within our tech department.

But by having Evergreen, it also allows for them to have this database to be able to search and find so many people that they would have never, even when we were in the office, had the ability to connect with because they would have been in a completely different office from them.

So, I think that is one of like the main benefits that we're continuing to see is those like cross-functional connections or even cross like not necessarily cross-functional into other departments even, just having access to someone else within their own department to be able to connect with is also really valuable for people.

Similar, we get those emails from people that are just singing kind of the praises of their mentor and the experience that they've had and the connection that they've been able to build, like lifelong connections that they will continue to meet with this person, even if one or both of them leaves the organization.

Like they will continue that mentorship and that relationship beyond this program, which is really impactful.

Thinking that they're actually building those real genuine connections with one another.

So I think it's been a huge like kind of pillar within our culture, just being able to offer this experience for people.

We've seen a lot of organic growth.

This is not a program that we promote regularly.

We have a program, we have SharePoint pages and things like that, that people can always learn about it.

But we're continuously seeing people come into the program just organically.

So I think that also sings kind of the praises of the program.

People are talking about it.

They're telling their colleagues about the program.

They're sharing because they're having good and really positive experiences together.

So from a skills perspective, similarly, it can be a little hard for us to track exactly what skills people are focusing on, especially within Evergreen, because the world's their oyster they there isn't a ton of structure they get to pick and choose kind of where that conversation is going to go every uh session we do offer them to have an agenda, and we have a generated agenda.

And then we've also turned on the feature for AI agendas.

So people can kind of adjust based off of the skills that they're looking to build and like what are the goals of their relationship, which is another awesome feature that together is rolled out.

But from specifically skills, it's hard for us to say exactly like, what are the top skills that people are looking to, or that they are developing.

We know what the top skills are that they're looking to develop, but I think that also adjusts, and it evolves as the relationship starts like really rolling.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think you both hit on an incredibly important aspect of mentorship and the value it is to employees.

We've seen with lots of programs the before and after of rating skills, and seeing the improvements as well too, you know, often track these via self-reported surveys.

But one of the like, incredible benefits that admittedly is hard to measure, but is no doubt very impactful for organizations, has been those connections that you're that both of you cited in terms of meeting with other teams and knowing what's out there and having this like meant this uh, employee or participant-led learning journey where they're able to identify areas where they want to grow, and they're able to pursue those, right?

And when we talk about allocating human capital and making sure that people are in the right roles, having this function and having this program to allow them to discover that, is hugely important not only for that employee's development, but also that cascades down to their engagement levels, their retention, they're much more likely to stay with the company and more often than not grow into a role or move into a role where they themselves are perhaps more engaged or even more impactful than where they are in the first role that they land, or the current role that they're in right now.

So again, thank you for both those responses.

I think it's absolutely fantastic and really nails, I think, one of the core values of what mentorship is about.

Now we're going to move into some more program specific questions.

And Anne-Marie would love to have you be the first that we dive into.

So First question, you mentioned that your program, A, it's global?

So it's all over the globe.

It's also highly structured as well, too, not only with the certain programs that you're running, but also with the format type.

I'm curious what considerations in terms of program design or participant support did you have in order to facilitate these programs effectively and really help the participants achieve the goal of the program?

So one of the first things we did that the platform allowed us to do is we did invest in the different language options.

And we think that it's also made a huge difference.

We have a lot of Spanish and French-speaking staff members.

So just having that the language options has been huge.

So although we have many different programs, we have myself and my team, we run it here from HQ, and I'm based here and the rest of my team, it was from Istanbul, and that's our HRHQ, we manage the program centrally.

However, every program has one or a couple of program coordinators.

And that allows us to, one, be able to really oversee what's happening in the different programs and to make sure that our program, our, and we call it our global mentoring framework, that every..

Regardless of where you sit, regardless of how much, how many staff members are supporting it, have the same foundational structure.

So are you having onboarding sessions?

Are you having, are you making sure you have the learning you need?

So just being able to manage that centrally has allowed us to make sure that every single program has at least a solid foundation and every staff member is getting that similar experience regardless of program.

So that's one of the things we're doing.

From HQ.

We can help them to vet participants.

We can help them in that way as well.

We also provide a lot of the different templates.

So because of the way the organization is structured.

We have HR or learning focal points for in emergency areas who maybe do not have the capacity as someone in another location to run a program.

So we're able to support those with templates, whether it's onboarding PowerPoint, come in to talk with their staff members, set up the platform for them.

So although we run these programs very separately, we wanted to still feel quite cohesive throughout the organizations that everyone has can come and say, you know what, I had a great experience here.

I had a great experience there.

So the programs are not all the same.

Because let's say I'm in one program as a young unit of staff, and then I go to another program in my region.

We don't want it to feel like you're going through the same learning, the same materials.

So they are different, but we all want to make sure they have that same high quality feel to them regardless of the program.

So those are some of the things we're doing.

Something else that we do is we make sure that monthly we're having meetings with our global and learning focal points who manage mentoring programs.

So we meet with the ones who are currently managing programs, but we also meet with colleagues who are just interested And just having these workshops once a month is such a good way for us to one, know who's interested in, they can see what's happening and that creates that excitement and that buzz.

But it also allows us to come and learn different lessons from each other.

Because you may run your, we may have done a program, and we did it the matching a certain way, or we did recruitment a certain way, and it just didn't work out.

So at least the next person on the call will know to maybe not go about it the way that we did.

So just having those monthly calls with our different focal points.

And sometimes it's 20 of us, 30, sometimes less, we're able to build this really good library of best practices so that everyone is coming in, and you know, you come in for a new program, you already have so much learning already there.

And we can see from mentors and mentees, you know, what are things they're working on?

What are things that worked?

What are things that didn't work?

Is there anything they need more?

Or we had some programs that were six months, that were a year, okay, what length worked better?

You know, it's little things like that we find that make a huge different, especially when it's cohort-based.

So learning from each other in that way has helped us to run many different programs, but not feel like we're running many different programs.

So it is a different program that everyone runs their own, but being able to come together in this way, in our forums, is helping us to really create a mentoring ecosystem.

Because that's what we wanted to be.

We wanted to be an ecosystem for this mentorship, for networking.

And so that's one of the ways we're able to manage from HQ, but still feels so connected and work with the field to create many programs, but that it still feels cohesive throughout.

One thing I'd, I love to double tap into and given the structure of the your team sitting in HQ and really helping kind of serving as like a bit of a strategy organization where people can come to you that you can help them with best practices and setting up the mentorship program.

How is that cascaded down into the content and the actual like materials that you do develop?

Is there any sort of involvement or process that you have when developing that content with the goals of the program in insight?

So what we do is we have a general template that everyone can come in, and they can kind of use.

When it's time to start a program, we duplicate that, and we give it to the colleagues.

But then, so it will have everything from your first and together also has great materials that we do keep in there as well.

So we have maybe your first meeting is about tips for your meeting, your meeting read session.

Your second one, we have goal setting templates.

And then we have communicating across cultures.

And then depending on the program, let's say it's one that's more of a global program.

It may be something around managing people who are not likely.

Me, communicating with people who are not like me.

Let's say we have our program that specifically for female leaders in Venezuela.

We can work with them and with our LAD colleagues to get TED talks and different articles that really fit that particular context.

So as much as we have this main template, we definitely sit down.

And one of the things that we do in my team is if you want to start a program, we have a meeting with you, and we say, what does success look like?

We want to really understand what success looks like because sometimes we assume that every office is doing and everyone has the same goals.

So if it's a functional area program, it may not look the same as for a regional or global program.

So we always want to know what success will look like and what they want these staff members to take from that.

And then once we understand those things, we go into a template and we start updating the learning.

So everyone may have like a goal setting template, for example, but when it comes to the actual learning materials, though we have similar things that want everyone to take away, we always want to go in and make sure that specific programs, if it's a functional area program, you know, what's happening currently in HR, AI in HR, for example.

We want to make sure that learning is up-to-date and really targeted for that specific audience.

So that's one of the things we do from HQ is making sure their agendas and the content in the materials really fit it.

And before we're wondering, oh, are people really using the agendas, all the materials?

And there was a time when we had made a mistake with one of the hyperlinks.

And we launched the program.

And people, most people came in, people came and said, it was like a link within a document.

So they, we realized we're like, oh, people are really using it.

Because within the first few days, multiple emails came and said, I'm sorry, I think one of your hyperlinks within the document is broken.

So for us, that was so comforting to know that people are really using these materials, and it really is helping them.

So the platform has helped us in that way because we could not be able to provide this kind of content and learning without it, without bombarding people's inboxes that are already overflowing with more emails.

So just being able to add those learning materials has been really crucial.

Yeah.

And yeah, two points I kind of wanted to touch on here.

The first of which is just the relationship you have with the coordinators and the people who are actually responsible for the program, what we often see..

Is perhaps sometimes thought of, in terms of the participant support that we have, like, people always ask, like, how do we guide the sessions?

How do we make sure that people are talking about the things that they need to talk about so that they're working on these, you know, desired skills?

And Having that tight integration with the people who are actually participating in the program and people who are on the ground and going to be a part of the program is super important.

Collecting that feedback, working hand in hand with them to understand, okay, what, what materials do you need to help achieve the goals of the program?

And then, um, you Yeah, and so I think that's like a really great kind of point about it.

The one thing that you did mention, and again, this is, and it's a quite unique is that you have a very strong kind of feedback loop with it.

You mentioned it before where you're launching programs, and you're generating learnings From a program design, like a development program implementation perspective, um, Can you tell us a little bit about that process?

Like what does that look like for you?

Like how do you make net improvements into your mentorship program design and delivery cohort over cohort?

So I think just working on the different programs, when we first did our first, we had our programs offline, and then we moved together platform, and we really scaled it.

So when we had our first program, we always said that we were kind of building the plane as we fly.

And so we're learning as we go, learning the platform, trying to understand it.

One of the things we learned, for example, for this cohort, we went with a full, this, we started with a full year.

And during that, we realized that maybe for our staff members who are mobile, who are busy, who are so, that may be a little bit too long.

And that's some feedback that we got.

And so when we come in and other programs are coming and say, we want to launch, we're thinking of the land.

We say, you know what?

You can, of course, it's up to you and your program as an admin to decide, but from the feedback we've received a year maybe too long, maybe explore six months to nine months.

And that's just a little bit of learning.

We learned there that we can make sure that other programs can think about.

Or something else was one of our programs started where they opened registration for mentees and mentors.

And although luckily within UNICEF, because we're building this mentoring culture, we don't struggle as much in mentor recruitment.

However, mentees always overwhelmingly sign up more than the mentors.

And so with the program that launched both registration for mentors and mentees, we had to find that we had to tell a lot of the mentees, we're so sorry we can't match you, you will be in the next cohort.

We haven't forgotten and still try to include them.

So now going forward, we tell up.

Is, you know, maybe consider doing the mentor recruitment first, just so you know what number you have before opening that mentee recruitment.

And that's something we learned from one of the programs that had this huge launch, and then we're kind of scrambling to try and not disappoint everyone and set those expectations.

So that's another learning we have that we're able to go in and let offices know that this has happened and So little things from the design, but also when we get feedback from mentors and mentees, you know, if we have an upskilling session in one and something, let's say we had innovation and that was something so, so good and maybe something the innovation was around AI.

If we know that's something that works, we know that this is learning that a lot of the people in the organization want.

So we're going to try to look into what in that session worked and maybe do a session on just that.

So in terms of also the learning they're looking for, we get feedback from participants and make sure that we can really hone in on what they're looking for.

So, um, getting that feedback loop from one, the different admins, and then also from the program participants and creating that loop, not just in HQ, but making sure that the knowledge we get from one office is shared with other offices as well, so that we are not reinventing the wheel each time.

So I think that sort of feedback loop.

And when we started the different programs, our fear was that it would just be too much.

But trying, being able to create this sort of web and network has allowed us to have these FAQs.

So if you're starting a program, we already have FAQs for you, the questions that we get all the time.

So building this library of knowledge helps us to really create that network and that we're not repeating, hopefully, similar mistakes that we've made before.

Yeah, amazing.

Love the iteration.

Love the progress that you've made.

With the mentorship programs and how it's actually evolved over time, even though it's been a short period.

It's been really incredible to see.

So again, Anne-Marie, thank you so much.

I know that was a couple of minutes.

Did great.

Beth would love to dive a little bit deeper into kind of the mentorship and the journey that has been through at Teledoc.

And so I know that you had originally started with a pilot program.

Just to test the waters and see how mentorship resonated with the organization, can you tell us a little bit about what that looked like?

What were perhaps the goals?

What were you looking for from that process?

I can.

We did start with a pilot program, and that was during the time of the pandemic.

At that time, also, our company had gone through some pretty large changes through mergers and acquisitions.

And so we were..

Really trying to kind of figure out our new identity kind of as an organization.

We were doing a ton of integration work at that time.

Tools and systems, but also integrating people together.

Like you were bringing two or three different companies together and trying to figure out what is our new culture of Teledoc.

All while being a telehealth company during the pandemic.

And so there was a lot going on within the organization.

So we decided to initially start with a pilot to just see kind of what's people's appetite for mentorship?

And we did this within our women's resource group.

And what we found was there was a ton of interest.

People were very excited about the opportunity to be able to build those connections, to be able to learn.

There was so much knowledge share that needed to happen at that time.

People were really hungry to be able to do that and be able to get this knowledge from other people.

So we initially created the program.

We started it, and we launched it with about 25, 30 pairs.

And it was a six-month formal cohort-based program.

So, you know, now that we have an Evergreen program, but we started that with a cohort-based program.

And we were really just trying to be able to get people to connect who had a commonality of they were all participants of the women's resource group.

But also, we knew that they were people who were very cross-functional from one another.

So we were wanting to be able to bridge those gaps, bridge those connections for people.

We did that program as application-based.

So people applied for the program versus it being that network that we have now.

And then we paired people based off of the skills and the goals that they had.

So what skills did someone want to maybe better?

And we were able to connect them with a mentor who had those skills or was reporting that they had those skills and vice versa around goals.

Making sure that those two people were going to connect and have similar goals for their development, similar goals for their career, maybe.

So being able to build those connections in that way.

So we started with that pilot.

It ran those six months and we learned a lot.

We learned a lot about our the current state of our business.

What I found to be kind of a struggle was we had several people during that time either leave the organization or their priorities.

Completely had to shift just based off of, you know, where the business was moving to at that time of more like volatility.

So we needed a little bit more agility within the tool because we were finding that in some instances, the mentees might not be having a great experience.

Because their mentor didn't have the capacity any longer to be able to support them at that moment.

So they were paired But if your mentor is not actually reaching out to you, you're not connecting with them, you're not getting any of the benefit of actually being a part of the program.

So that kind of switched us into where we moved to.

So based off of those learnings from the initial pilot, we decided to move to that, that evergreen platform.

So we found that we really needed to be able to be a little bit more agile in the person's experience.

So instead of it being a six-month experience, we needed the ability for one set of pairs to be able to connect for 18 months.

Because they had built that connection, and they wanted to continue meeting together.

There was mutual benefit of that relationship.

We also needed for people to be able to just do one session, an informational interview, getting to know someone, learning a little bit about their role, maybe there's an opportunity where they're wanting to move into that department, be able to learn and connect with someone.

And so that's why we decided to end up going with Evergreen to kind of meet employees, both the mentors and the mentees, kind of where they each individually were at, at any given state of their journey.

We did with that, we still did mentor recruitment first because we knew that if we didn't get mentors into the system, and we turned on evergreen.

All these mentees were going to come in, and then they weren't going to be able to connect any with anyone.

So we did first do that, that mentor recruitment.

And that was really beneficial to us.

We got a lot of different.

Mentors into the tool.

They were able to fill out all of their registration, register for the new program, And then once we turn that on for our mentees, and we promoted it to them, there were lots of connections that were being able to be made immediately versus just kind of pausing and there was no one for them to actually connect with.

So this is really, really has worked for our business.

We know that there's so much more, though, that we can do with together.

And I'm getting so many ideas for Anne-Marie.

You have such robust..

Programs and I love that you still have the agility within that your HQ, but you're also allowing other departments, other parts of the globe to build their own programs versus all of that having to come from your team.

You're creating kind of the, the framework for mentorship within your organization and all the support functions for that, but then allowing other people to kind of you know, build their own programs within the parameters of what you've set up, which I think that's amazing and is really, really beneficial.

So one of the things that's on our roadmap for either later this year or 2025 is looking into group mentorship.

So expanding the offerings that we do have within our tool, but also going to the people who we know are really talented or really great within our organization.

And allowing them to be able to kind of lead some of their own, their own programs as well.

So there are some of the ideas that we have for the future.

But also kind of why we switched from that cohort based programming to evergreen but also allowing ourselves to be open that we could evolve, we could change that, we can have all of those different things within the tool, and together does support that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I think that's, to your last point, like, One of the things that we shared, and we recently hosted an engagement master class where we go over all these different tactics, tools and tips for driving program engagement.

And one of them was a very high level tip was about mentorship strategy in terms of What does that actually like look like at a very, an organization that leverages and wields mentorship as an L&D program and a learning modality?

What does that look like when it's done particularly well?

And we saw that a lot of..

Organizations had these broad overreaching programs like the Evergreen program that you're running Beth.

And then they get more specific and more focused with targeted programs.

Program.

So for example, onboarding new employees, a new managers program, leadership development, reverse mentoring.

And they get rather focused with them as well, too.

And that really is the I would say, like, one of the values of having a mentorship platform is that it doesn't just help you run one program.

It helps you.

It's really the bedrock of launching a mentorship strategy and orchestrating all of these programs in unison and making sure that the user experiences one centralized so no one's going over to a million one spots, but also that is a consistent user experience as well too I want to be mindful of time.

We've got 10 minutes left.

So I do want to kind of direct our attention towards the audience Q&A to make sure that we get some of these questions done.

Um, so again, Anne Marie, Beth, thank you so much.

I shared lots of insightful knowledge.

I'm really hoping in the last couple of minutes, we can get some more out.

So if you're in the audience, And you have a question.

If you haven't asked it already, please ask it in the Q&A function, just so that we can track it.

We will be starting off with the first one that comes from Jessica Lang.

And so this one is really about..

Winning buy-in, right?

So what benefits, the question is, what benefits would you recommend emphasizing in a proposal to upper-level leadership to receive buy-in for basically a mentorship platform?

Anyone have a particular preference for going first year?

I can jump in here.

Thanks, so of course, you know, when you do mentorship, and we have, we did mentorship before the platform before, but of course, when you're going to upscale and really, you know, get the platform, It is a cost associated that you're asking your organization to invest.

And in an organization where like UNICEF, for example, where the type of funding we get and how we use it has to be very, very specific.

I think one of the things we try to emphasize is mentorship.

It's so crucial for helping to build the company culture that I hope most companies want.

It is, and building a couple of culture, it's not just, you know, birthdays and happy hours, allowing staff to feel psychologically safe.

That's something we think that mentorship has helped to accomplish because as much as you train your managers and supervisors, being able to go and talk to someone within your organization, who maybe is not your direct supervisor or maybe not in your team, and having that psychologically safe space to discuss, I think does wonders for the organization.

And the networking is something that I think it's so hard to set up outside of mentorship, that level of networking, where you're meeting people in different functional areas, then offices, Even the most social, most confident staff member may have a hard time just sending an email for that random person for that coffee chat.

But if it's mentoring, and we're both on the platform, it's easy to just send that button, click that button and try to match.

So as much as mentorship, um, there is that cost associated, whether it's time from the ad from the staff member supporting it or the financial investment in the platform.

For us, we see a huge difference because one program went from the one I manage, from 23 pairs to over 90 pairs.

And when we hear that feedback from especially our young staff who say, seeing this and seeing how I can go into the organization makes me want to stay.

That I think is a huge, huge, it's an investment, but when you have staff members who feel more included in a building that includes a space, and they want to stay in your organization, it would make that investment seem quite tiny to the staff members experience and them loving where they work.

Work.

So that's the way we kind of sold it.

And once you do it, and if you're just convinced that to invest for one year, you will already see the response to that year.

And hopefully that will make them want to keep investing more.

Beth, anything to add there?

I would say plus one to all of that.

I think that was great.

And I think another thing that you can share, mentorship is one of like the easiest cells I've found with like, L&D programming that we have brought to the organization.

And you can kind of like the story that you're able to tell your leadership team.

Like many of them have gotten to where they are.

Because of mentorship experiences that they have had, whether it's formal or informal.

But being able to pull on like kind of that heart string a little bit, I think was really helpful.

So thinking about what is the story that you're going to tell?

What are you anticipating those benefits to be for your organization?

But it did seem like it was one of the easier cells for us just because leaders can really see the benefit because they've experienced the benefit themselves.

Yeah.

And I think One point that you mentioned, both you mentioned, is like the stories, the narratives.

Like, mentorship really is a part of, of almost like a hero's journey.

Like every great leader has had a mentor in some shape, way or form.

And selling it on those benefits is great.

You can, there are also ways that you can, you know, tie this back to retention, tie it back to skill development.

And one of the tips that we had in another customer panel is from Alyssa Rodriguez, who manages HubSpotts program.

And this is a bit more of a tactical tip, but, She, she, she, she, her advice was, don't, um, don't frame it in the things that you're going to gain, for example, like we're going to boost retention by X percent.

Look at it also in the ways that if you don't make this change, what is like the status quo that's going to be continuing, right?

And so when people are pitching often L&D programs, you know, perhaps..

The default assumption is comparing it towards traditional LMS content or paid trainings as well too.

And so with mentorship on the back end, there's a lot you can do in terms of, one, the effort that's involved on L&D's behalf, to organize and set up their program in such a way that reduces the amount of effort.

Or there are ways that you can reduce also the cost of it as well too.

For example, with our platform, we have user-based pricing.

We base it off of active usage.

And so if you compare that to something like a fixed cost for a training or content development, It's a little bit different.

And so taking the time to explain that and dive into it is often very helpful as well, too, if you're pitching this, for example, for the first time to senior leadership.

So, yeah.

Stories and just the actual nuts and bolts of how is an L&D team going to implement this?

I think are great points to have.

Okay, so we got that.

And then we've got one here from Catherine Morris, and the question is, for the purpose of driving, collaboration or networking, do your mentor program still operate with a traditional, more experience, less experienced pairing?

I know that you've talked about Colley Connect, peer mentoring.

Would love for you to kind of spearhead this one.

I would say the majority of our relationships are still more in that traditional model.

However, and we do have some of those parameters like I was talking about kind of set within the tool.

But not all of our, our peers are operating in that format either.

So people have come to us and asked us, hey, I'm wanting to..

Of a reverse format, we can pair them on the back end to be able to make sure that happens.

They might not be served up that pair with the tool based off of our algorithm.

But we also have the ability to make those connections.

We are seeing a lot of the Collie Connect starting to happen, and we're about to promote this program again, and it will be the first time that we're truly promoting it, giving them the option to do Colleague Connect.

So more promoting that connecting with people who are a similar level to you to be able to share your experiences in that way.

So maybe two first time managers wanting to connect and learn from each other and the experiences that they have been happening.

Or been having, or maybe two senior managers within different departments wanting to connect to be able to learn a little bit around the nuances of their roles, but thinking about like the differences between their roles or their departments or whatever, whatever that may be.

But I would say the majority of our relationships are that more traditional experience.

But also from my experience, I have been the mentor or the mentee in several relationships within this program.

Once you actually get into the conversations, and you're meeting one-on-one, I found that a lot of that dynamic actually has gone out the door.

And even if I've been the mentor, I've learned a ton from my mentee as well.

And so that kind of more traditional format actually feels like it has been eliminated a little bit.

So each relationship, I think, is very different of what is the goal of the individual.

They have the ability to be able to you know, once they get there together, they figure out what they're going to actually talk about and where their conversation is going to go.

And all of those things, but most pairs are that they start as a traditional experience.

Amazing.

And Just because we are at time, I do want to make this the last question.

So, Anne-Marie, any final thoughts on this question?

So, um, do you still operate with the traditional more experience, less experience, one-to-one matching in your mentorship programs?

Yes, I think a lot of them, when we do post them, they are the traditional more experienced X experience.

But recently this year, we have We do have our first reverse mentorship program, which is the less with the more experienced, but something that we've been encouraging our programs to do, even if they're not necessarily a reverse mentorship program, is if let's say your cohort is six months, six sessions, to have one session where you really focus explicitly, explicitly on a reverse mentorship meeting for that one session.

So it's a way to work reverse mentorship in.

But I think what Beth said here is so important because whenever we have our final surveys, and we have our as for testimonials, all the mentors came back and said, I learned just as much, if not more, from my mentee.

So even if it's traditional, we have our mentors come back and say that they learned just as much.

And when we are trying to sell our program and talking about it, we always say it's a learning experience for both, you know?

Your mentor is not pulling you along, you're on the journey together.

And so that's one of the ways we say it.

So even if it's traditional, we do find that When we say Met Ship House, break hierarchies, I think in the meeting itself with the pairs, it already does that because they come back and see I didn't feel like I was talking to this very senior colleague.

I felt like I was talking to someone who yes could help guide me, but I felt like I could teach them as well.

So it is traditional, but I do think it helps to break that hierarchy and that boundary.

Amazing.

Well, thank you for the wonderful answers that we've kind of gotten from you all over the last.

Our, we are at time.

So we are going to wrap up.

Thank you for everyone in the audience also for asking some really great questions.

I really hope this was valuable for you.

Like I mentioned, we will be following up with the recording.

So if you do want to go over, check some of the content, hear some of the answers.

We'll be sending that out shortly.

Anne-Marie, Beth, again, thank you so much.

That was wonderful.

For everyone in the audience.

Again, I really hope you enjoyed that.

And if you have any questions, please feel free to chat in with our team, our team of experts are more than happy to help answer any mentorship related questions or help you even explore a program and setting one up as well too.

So with that, we'll end the session here.

And thank you so much.

Bye now.

Bye.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much.

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