7 Ways to Improve Engagement with your Mentoring Programmes and Schemes

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Running a mentoring scheme can be a challenge. Initially there are considerations around uptake, mentor and mentee ratio balances, and then the work required to ensure matching of pairs is effective. Once you’ve matched individuals, you may find there are further challenges with ensuring both the mentors and mentees stay engaged. Fortunately, this is where PushFar’s platform comes into play. Our mentoring software can not only significantly reduce the resource required to setup a mentoring scheme, by automating intelligent mentor matching, but after that, our platform helps to ensure your mentors and mentees stay engaged.

We’ve collated together 7 top tips to ensure individuals stay engaged in your mentoring programmes and schemes. Working with hundreds of organisations and thousands of mentoring relationships, our list of top tips has been collated through personal experience, trial and error, and a wealth of advice from HR and learning and development managers, experienced with running globally leading mentoring schemes. So, here goes…

1. Ensure Motivated at the Start
Yes, we know, this one might seem obvious, but it is genuinely half the battle. If a mentor or mentee is not motivated at the start of a mentoring scheme, you are going to find it significantly harder to sustain engagement throughout the relationship. There are several ways we would recommend you can ensure motivation at the start. These include educating mentors and mentees on all of the wonderful benefits of being mentored, highlighting some of the most significant famous mentoring relationships and outlining key reasons for offering mentoring specifically to your organisation.

2. Make Sure Your Mentor Matches are Right
Matching mentors and mentees are a tricky balancing act. It is a fine art and requires individuals to take into consideration a wealth of data, demographics and insights. We, at PushFar, are well versed in this. Our ever-evolving algorithm uses data-driven machine learning, to help suggest the best matches for both mentors and mentees. PushFar’s mentoring software then suggests the five best matches for an individual, thus giving them the opportunity to choose the person they feel best able to provide support. If you ensure the mentor matches are right, the engagement will come far more easily and naturally.

3. Create an Organisational Mentoring Culture
Mentoring needs to be visible across your organisation, to ensure it works. Setting standards, ensuring everyone is aware of mentoring and everyone is actively promoting mentoring will, in turn, result in a greater mentoring engagement. How do you do this? Reference mentors and mentees regularly, ensure everyone has access to mentoring and also ensuring everyone understands what mentoring is will help you significantly. As well as this, ensure you have mentoring role-models, which leads us on to number four…

4. Support your Mentoring Role-Models
Once you launch your mentoring schemes and programmes, you will quickly find that there are some employees and individuals who engage and really make the most of the fantastic opportunity. Keep an eye out for these individuals and ensure you support them. These are your mentoring role-models. Nurture them, congratulate them and, if they are happy for you to do so, shout about them and their success throughout. If they are happy for you to do so, promote their successes with quotes, testimonials and interviews on your intranet, at large office meetings and on emails.

5. Start at the Top
You can’t expect people in your organisation to latch onto mentoring if your managers aren’t engaged with it. So, it’s time to look at the “top table” for the organisation and make sure they are all either being mentored, mentoring others, or doing both. Every leader in the organisation should be seen in an active mentoring relationship to solidify the mentoring culture across your organisation. If they can, try and turn them into role-models in the organisation too. As advocates, your organisation’s directors and executives should shout about how wonderful mentoring is too.

6. Sustain Engagement with Automated Reminders
PushFar’s mentoring software comes into play here, in a big way. We’re used to traditional, manually-run mentoring schemes dropping off pretty quickly. Ironically, ‘work’ gets in the way of mentoring relationships and individuals are quick to forget to schedule meetings and make time for mentoring. With PushFar’s mentoring software, we automatically send out reminder emails and push notifications to individuals, based on their current mentoring state. When they are due to schedule meetings, overdue goals and have upcoming targets’, PushFar’s platform steps in and sends the valuable reminders to ensure engagement and sustainment are there.

7. Make it Easy for Mentors and Mentees
We’ve seen a lot of organisations running mentoring programmes and schemes through excel spreadsheets and word documents. This is far from ideal for a number of reasons. When it comes to engagement, you have to make it easy for both parties to manage their mentoring relationships. Again, PushFar’s software can help here. We give both mentors and mentees a dashboard to track their meetings, agendas, goals and objectives.

So, there you have it – 7 ways to easily improve mentoring engagement across your organisation. Remember, PushFar’s mentoring software can significantly increase engagement and reduce the resource required to achieve the above. What’s more, we can get things started for your organisation in just a few days. If you’re interested in finding out more about how PushFar’s mentoring software can help, click here.