Mentoring from Nissan -

Building a Mentoring Culture focused on attraction, engagement and retention.

This case study explores the challenges faced by Nissan when considering the offering of a mentoring program to employees, the solution PushFar’s platform and team offered and the results of implementing their mentoring program.

An introduction

Founded in 1984, Nissan Sunderland is one of the largest car-manufacturers plants in the UK, where products are distributed around the world. With over 6,000 employees, Nissan is more than just cars, putting their people and culture at the heart of their business. Nissan, as an organisation, are passionate about not only building innovative products but also finding creative ways to promote engagement across their workforce.

Nissan is incredibly focused on being innovative and creating employee engagement among their workforce.

Nissan has a large workforce and were looking to create networking opportunities across different departments within the organisation.

Nissan has built up a wealth of experience amongst their workforce over the last 38 years and are now seeing long serving employees approaching retirement. Nissan aim to retain this knowledge in the business through mentoring the future of their workforce.

Nissan have been investing in resources to create more engagement amongst their employees.

In 2021, Nissan switched from their previous employee engagement strategy and changed it to a strategy where leaders are more involved, each taking on different pillars to engage with employees.

Some of these strategy pillars included leadership, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), well-being, employee experience and “the Nissan way”.

“What impressed me, was that PushFar answered me within 10 minutes. I’d gone from this state of anticipation and anxiety, to a place of being ‘well we know what to do now’ and we started to put together a strategy of how we’re going to sell this to people’”

Graham Parker, Nissan

The Challenges

Nissan hadn’t previously used mentoring software solutions, so needed to conduct research into the mentoring space.

They were looking for a primarily UK-based platform, due to the location of the workforce.

Mentoring kept coming up in meetings due to wanting to build a culture that values learning, networking and mentoring. Nissan are wanting to create a workforce, where reaching out to someone to be your mentor could be done with ease and be considered a ‘normal’ thing to do.

Nissan needed to get other members of the team to ‘buy-in’, particularly those in senior management positions.

Nissan was looking for an easy-to-use platform that could be utilised by all employees.

Nissan was looking for a solution that offered individual-led matching, to remove administrative bias.

Spreadsheets would have been challenging to use due to the sheer amount of employees and we’re worried about it becoming a huge administrative task.

Nissan were concerned about educating people on mentoring, how they support participants to be a good mentor and how they match mentors.

“It feels like very much a joint venture between ourselves and PushFar in this quest for a mentoring culture”

Angeline Cross, Nissan

The Solution

When looking for a mentoring platform to implement, Nissan ultimately decided to go for PushFar, due to:

The ability to test the platform before purchase, to give them a feel of the software before purchasing. As engineers, this was an important decision maker.

A great pitch by the team, who Nissan could tell we’re confident and passionate about the software and helping organisations thrive.

PushFar offered an easy-to-use and accessible mentoring platform that is being used by both the younger and older generations within Nissan.

The PushFar team were supportive throughout the entire process, which made Nissan confident in their choice.

PushFar's strong reporting capabilities allow Nissan to easily monitor the success of the mentoring program.

PushFar was able to create a scalable mentoring program that could be rolled out within Nissan to their employees.

PushFar allowed Nissan to automatically match participants and remove administrative barriers and bias.

PushFar’s intuitive dashboard allowed administrators to see the number of active participants and profiles created.

The PushFar platform decreased administrative time and stress through an all-in-one solution.

The PushFar were able to remove any worries Nissan previously had, due to effective communication from the team who answered Nissans questions within 10 minutes.

“It’s helping with the skill up and generate the leaders of the future”

Graham Parker, Nissan

The Results

There is currently a 65% activity rate for program participants.

500+ meetings have been conducted since the program launched in January.

300+ program participants have signed up for the PushFar platform since January, with numbers expected to increase when the mentorship program is opened up across the organisation.

People are more comfortable reaching out to individuals asking them to be their mentor.

More employees are receiving the support and guidance they need in the workplace.

Great feedback from both mentors and mentees.

People who were previously sceptical about the implementation of a mentoring program due to previous systems not being effective, have come forward and left good feedback.

A mentoring culture has been created.