Preparing a Successful Mentorship Program Launch

Given my time working in Human Resource (HR) and Safety, I have a bit of experience building programs from the ground up, including mentorship programs for office employees, diesel mechanics and truck drivers. The bones of each mentorship program are the same. While I do not enjoy agonizing over structure and getting lost in details, I do value structure and details when it comes to mobilizing many people toward a common goal. A mentorship program will not succeed without some amount of thoughtful planning and clear ownership. I’ll walk through a few questions you should answer prior to launching a program.?

Who should own running the program? This could be one person, or a few people. I suggest you keep it as small as possible and ensure those people have hours each week they can dedicate to the program. A mentorship program requires consistent communication, careful recruiting, detailed training, ongoing evaluation of people and processes, measuring success, failures and accountability and making adjustments. Depending on your size and goals, this might be a full-time job, and depending on the varied talents of who you have in mind, this may need to be a few different people.?

Which leaders will help champion the program? As you launch the program, it is important it is seen as deeply valued at the highest levels if it is to be respected. While perhaps your most recent HR hire has the most enthusiasm and time for the program, he/she is not likely to be taken seriously by the tenured employees you wish to recruit. Consider who commands the most respect across your organization while also able to inspire others to action on new ideas. Include this person/these people early to get their buy-in and thoughts before you fully explore and design your program, then include them again at the end for their final stamp of approval and to craft their supportive communication at launch.?

What will you expect of your mentors? I recommend creating a mentor job description, and if you’re feeling creative, coming up with a unique title. I always liked the sound of “Culture Ambassador”. A job description and title show you are taking and expect the program to be taken as seriously as they take their job. This is an incredibly part-time but valuable second job in the company. It also gives you a chance to outline clear expectations and qualifications.

As far as expectations, this can vary depending on how you match mentors and mentees. Personally, I think matching people in different jobs but in the same department is hugely beneficial. For example, a Driver Manager mentoring a Load Planner will create friendships across groups that can easily clash, will provide sympathy and insight they may not otherwise have to both parties, and will still help establish meaningful relationships for the newbie across the Operations department. A mentor is ideally introducing the mentee to the company culture and helping them feel a part of it as quickly as possible. It is not about training the mentee for their job. In fact, I would avoid allowing any supervisors or trainers to be mentors because if they are not peer-level, they are less approachable for questions and/or less connected to an entry-level person’s experience. A separate mentorship program of supervisors/managers mentorship recently promoted supervisors or managers would be appropriate and very beneficial, but again, keep mentorships peer level.

As far as qualifications, I do think people with less than one year of experience can still make great mentors as they have just gone through the process of acclimating themselves and remember what it feels like. However, for jobs with a safety-sensitive name or steep learning curve, a person with less than one year at your company may not yet have the experience to mentor well.?

What is the benefit of becoming a mentor? Besides possibly free meals and new best friends, mentoring prepares the mentors for the next step in their careers. Not only does it set them apart for leadership to consider, but it helps them understand the challenges of finding and retaining good people.?

In addition, I would lean on your mentors to get their opinions on upcoming company initiatives as a sort of “soft launch”. These should be some of your most engaged employees with both a tenured and a new employee perspective. They should be recognized as such by being let in early on possible decisions and changes when possible. This is mutually beneficial for the mentors as engagement and development, and for the company as a vital perspective from which leadership can easily become detached.??

On top of these benefits, I suggest adding a monetary benefit which could take many forms. Perhaps a phone stipend if they are using their personal phones heavily (mechanics and drivers), a bonus based on retention or simply based on how many mentors they take on, or maybe gift cards would be easier to facilitate than a bonus. Think on what makes sense in your culture and is affordable given the excellent development and improved retention you expect to affect with this program.?

How will you measure the success of the mentors and the program? Often, the simplest measure with a clear return on investment is retention. It is easy to consider the cost of recruiting, training, and lower productivity of both the trainer and the recruit. Many claim you spend 1.5-2 times the annual salary of an employee to replace them with an equally experienced person. Given the opportunity for also developing and engaging the mentors, it is important to measure the retention for both to attribute to the success of the program. If you want to get as close to the true impact on retention as possible, you can offer a trial where only half your recruits at random are assigned mentors. However, comparing it to retention in previous years will be much simpler and less likely to cause heartburn to the unfortunate recruits who were not assigned mentors and are likely to feel it is unfair they were not assigned mentors.?

You can also measure how many of your mentors promote to higher level positions compared to the rest of your employee population, which shows the program helps prepare employees for their next step and increases their skills and influence.?

Morale and culture can also see a boost from these programs. There are many companies who will survey your employees for how they are feeling either on a project basis, a regular basis, or sometimes as a means to win a “Top Workplace” award. Depending on your capacity, you could survey your employees before mentorship announcement and a year in to see what possible impact it has had. If you elect to survey yourself, I would keep the questions focused on how they feel about the company overall, how connected they feel to the company, how supported they feel by their coworkers, etc.?

These are the initial questions to answer before you even launch your mentorship program. Without the right preparation, your launch can easily fall flat. It’s much harder to recover from a bad launch than to set it up properly in the first place. In my next article, we will ask the questions you’ll need to answer in order to launch successfully.?