5 signs your mentorship is working

So you’ve finally found a mentor or a mentee who is a great fit. But how do you know if your partnership is actually working? And what do you do if you suspect it might be time to find a different mentor or mentee?

To help you identify whether your partnership is on the right track, we’ve compiled a list of five signs that indicate your mentoring relationship is working.

1. You’re meeting consistently

With mentoring, it’s important to establish one simple guideline off the bat: How often will you meet? It could be once a week or several times a month, but the goal is to be consistent.

Consistently taking time demonstrates commitment, which builds trust between the mentor and mentee. Having a regular meeting on the calendar also provides structure to the relationship and minimizes stress, so you can focus on what really matters: development.

Questions to ask yourself:

Have we been meeting consistently?
If we haven’t been meeting consistently, what are the common blockers and how can we address them?
Is our time together productive?

2. You’re both thinking outside the box

Mentors and mentees who are curious and willing to try new tactics will gain the most from a mentoring relationship. Curiosity helps us learn, retain new information, and make progress faster. That’s why the best mentors provide new perspectives and help mentees see troublesome situations in a new light. They also ask questions that challenge mentees to reexamine their beliefs while exploring possible solutions in a supportive environment.

Questions to ask yourself:

Is my mentor or mentee open to new ideas or ways of approaching things?
Have we been able to break through the “status quo” and create a mentoring relationship that works specifically for us?
Do we frequently discuss fresh ideas, perspectives, and approaches to problems?

3. You’re both reaching your goals.

Among the strongest signs of a great partnership is the achievement of both the mentor’s and mentee’s goals. For a mentor, this may be practicing their leadership skills or improving their communication abilities. For a mentor, this may be getting a promotion or building more confidence in their role. Regardless of what the goals are, they need to be explicitly defined at the start of the partnership. Once the goals are defined, they should be examined over time and modified as needed.

Questions to ask yourself:

Are we both clear on what our goals are for this mentoring relationship?
Are we having conversations about short-term goals and progress made in reaching them?
Are we also having conversations about larger, big-picture goals and progress made in reaching them?

4. You’re both holding each other accountable.

A sign of a good mentoring relationship is accountability. This means establishing a two-way street where mentors provide honest guidance and mentees hold themselves responsible for meeting established goals. For example, mentors can establish an informal agenda via email, review notes from previous sessions, and brainstorm topics for discussion. Mentees can take notes during the week of wins and losses as they occur so they have a list of conversation topics ready.

Questions to ask yourself:

Are we both showing up to meetings prepared? If not, what can be improved?
Are we reviewing what we learned in our previous meetings?
Are we also checking in on progress made since the last meeting?

5. You’re both truly listening. And you can see each other.

Mentors and mentees spend the entirety of each session talking to each other, so active listening is critical for both parties. When responding to their mentees, mentors should ask thoughtful follow-up questions and never be judgmental. Similarly, mentees should be open-minded to hearing their mentor’s perspective on an issue – regardless of whether or not they agree.

Questions to ask yourself:

Do we both practice active listening during our sessions?
Do I feel heard by my mentor or mentee?
If you do, what does your mentor or mentee do to make you feel heard? If not, what does your mentor or mentee not do?

Uh-oh, it’s not a match. Now what?

If you’ve started to doubt the relationship you have with your mentor or mentee, consider discussing your concerns with them before calling it quits. It may be helpful to try to hone in on why you think the partnership didn’t work. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

Do we have a clash in working styles?
Is the other person not open-minded enough in providing or implementing solutions?
Am I not making progress on my goals?
Do the meetings feel unproductive or not like a valuable use of time?

Addressing questions like these will help you identify the specific issue and can help you pick a new mentor or mentee in the future – or even save your current mentoring relationship. If you still decide the partnership isn’t working, it may be time to have a conversation.

5 benefits mentors bring to L&D programs

Learning and development programs are as varied as companies themselves, but there’s one feature that’s constant across the most effective L&D programs: mentoring.

Across industries, mentoring has been shown to produce solid business outcomes. In fact, a 2019 survey of American workers by SurveyMonkey found that 91% of individuals who have a mentor are satisfied with their job. When implementing or modifying your company’s L&D program, mentoring is one of the best ways to boost employee engagement, create strong leaders for your company, and even keep turnover costs in check.

Incorporating mentors into your long-term learning and development strategy is a great way to ensure you receive a high investment return. We explore the 5 most common roles mentors play in effective learning and development programs below.

1. Mentors strengthen your company’s culture

What does your company stand for? Whatever your values, they have to be embedded into how your organization acts and makes decisions. Mentoring relationships are a great way to help your employees feel the impact of your company’s values.

For example, let’s say one of your company values is “Collaboration: Working together for the good of the group.” People who participate in mentoring get the chance to collaborate with people they might not usually work with. This 1:1 relationship allows employees to live the value of collaboration every time they meet with their mentor or mentee.

We admit collaboration is a prime example, but we promise, you can input any value here and the example still works. Why? Because mentoring is about growth, and what company doesn’t value that?

2. Mentors boost employee engagement

Employee engagement, how motivated people are to put in extra effort and stay with an organization, is crucial to business success. One of the most consistent drivers of employee engagement is whether or not employees have learning and development opportunities.

Mentorship is one of the most personalized development opportunities you can provide to employees. Whether internal or external, mentors can help mentees feel more confident about their performance by supporting their developmental goals. When employees are confident in their skills, they’re more likely to put in extra effort.

Studies have shown that the benefit for mentors is just as apparent as the benefits for mentees. A study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior showed that mentors (versus non-mentors) were more satisfied with their jobs and committed to the organization.

3. Mentors help cultivate your company’s next generation of leaders

To be successful, you must invest in development, especially when it comes to cultivating company leaders. Mentoring can aid in succession planning and leadership development by cultivating a path for high potential employees.

Promoting employees from within has plenty of benefits: lower training costs, improved employee retention, and better morale. Leadership development and internal promotion also sends a good message to employees; they know that their efforts will be recognized and rewarded.

4. Mentors provide personalized learning strategies

Highly structured, one-size-fits-all learning programs don’t work for everyone. Mentoring works because it can be personalized and customized for what an individual needs.

Mentoring allows employees to engage in learning and development at a time that works during their schedule; this is especially valuable during times when the workload is heavy. It makes learning readily accessible and minimizes stress by giving employees the freedom to set up regular meetings whenever they choose.

As flexible, remote working arrangements become the norm, providing flexibility in your learning and development program becomes even more important.

5. Mentors protect your bottom line by retaining employees

In addition to cultivating benefits within your organization, mentoring has cost-effective advantages, too, especially when HR budgets and resources are constrained.

One of the main benefits of mentoring programs is that mentors help their mentees feel supported. This can play a major role in reducing employee turnover — you won’t have to invest as much in costs to hire, on-board and train new employees. Expenses related to turnover are significant. Research from the Society for Human Resource Management suggests that direct replacement costs can reach as high as 50% to 60% of an employee’s annual salary.

By providing personalized advice to a mentee, mentors help minimize turnover because they work with employees to manage frustrations and concerns they may have. They also help them build the skills they need for success and increase the chances that employees will want to stay with your company over the long-term.

Why career planning matters

Human capital is every business’s greatest resource. Which is why attracting and retaining talent is critical to a company’s success. While salary and benefits are important, emerging Millennial leaders often prioritize personal growth and purpose over compensation. In fact, a comprehensive, global survey of employees and HR leaders by Reed Consulting revealed that one of the top reasons for employee attrition is lack of opportunities for personal and career development. Lack of development is three times as influential as any other factor in an employee’s decision to leave.

Engaging employees

Recent research by Gallup shows that only 29% of Millennials are engaged at work. The Millennial workforce is disconnected from their jobs and companies. They are going through the motions and not putting energy or passion into their jobs. Part of this stems from the fact that Millennials prioritize personal development in their careers and many companies still aren’t offering enough L&D opportunities.

That’s not good news for employers. Younger generations are willing to hop from job to job if their needs go unmet by their employer. In fact, Gallup found 60% of Millennials were open to new job opportunities. They may not actually want to switch jobs but they don’t see any compelling reasons to stay or any path to advancement and purpose. Millennials will keep looking until they find a role, career path, and company that is worth sticking with.

Planning a career

It’s not enough to simply help employees develop skills to improve their day-to-day performance. Employees today want a career vision that will help them find purpose, meaning and a future through ongoing learning and growing on the job. In fact, the top focus area among nearly 10,000 participants in Everwise’s mentoring program is career planning. Career planning helps employees understand their current strengths, determine what skills they need to develop, learn ways to improve their current and future performance, and guides them to find purpose in their role.

Career development approaches such as training, coaching and mentoring can help employees develop as individuals and create and achieve goals. Supporting career planning requires that companies invest in development programs that offer scalable, personalized learning opportunities to help employees find the right career path.

Personal growth and purpose

The problem is most employees don’t see a path to keep moving forward within their organization. A 2015 SHRM survey found that only 20 percent of employees were very satisfied with how their company was addressing their ambitions. By providing opportunities for employees to plan their careers, employers can better understand and track their individual goals.

Once employees have set their goals, employers can provide customized learning opportunities to help employees achieve those goals. Everwise recently launched a new Marketplace of interactive learning paths from renowned authors and coaches to help employees develop the skills they need at their own pace, but in a virtual group setting. Jocelyn Greenky‘s “Getting to Your Destination” module is designed to help employees create and implement a strategic, dynamic three-step plan to get the results necessary to achieve their goals. Ongoing development opportunities like this will keep employees moving in the right direction.

When you connect an employee to the right people and content to make their career dreams come true, you also give that employee a sense of purpose. They want to put their talents to good use. It turns out 60% of employees in Gallup’s State of the American Workplace say the ability to do what they do best in a role is “very important” to them. According to Aaron Hurst in The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World, 73% of purpose-oriented professionals report being satisfied with their job.

In Conclusion

Guiding an employee towards personalized growth and learning opportunities will help them identify their unique strengths, competencies, and skill gaps, and discover career path options that will keep them engaged. Helping them along a satisfying career path will demonstrate the company’s dedication to their personal growth and purpose. Better yet, it will result in improved attraction and retention, saving a company time and money over the long haul and laying a foundation for talent to thrive as careers progress.

The value of measuring ROI in L&D programs

The rewards of a learning and development program are many: increased employee retention, engagement, and productivity, just to name a few. Having a L&D strategy is especially crucial to capturing millennial talent – the largest segment of the workforce, for whom ongoing development support trumps all other benefits.

But despite the fact that many companies continue to pump money into L&D programs (to the tune of $90.6 billion last year), many companies don’t actually know whether their programs are working because they don’t test or quantify the impact of the training. In fact, one McKinsey study found that a mere 8 percent of organizations actually evaluate the value of their L&D initiatives by tracking return on investment (ROI).

Without proof of efficacy, development programs are the first to go when budgets tighten. If organizations want to keep their training programs, they must establish robust measures and go beyond a simple survey to capture ROI so that management can make a business case of their value during rounds of cost-cutting.

What’s the business case for measuring ROI?

Measuring how well a development program is working validates your efforts, not just to you and employees, but also to management. It identifies when the status quo isn’t working and where change is needed.

Passing out participant feedback forms to capture feedback once the program is finished is helpful but doesn’t cut it anymore when used alone.

Tech, creativity and innovation have changed how today’s L&D programs deliver training to employees, whether that means participating in a livestream or learning on an interactive platform. Technology has helped lower the cost of training programs and provided a better, more engaging experience for users. With so many changes in the L&D space, now is a good time to evaluate your current methods.

Step 1: Calculate your investment

The good news is that big data and technology have unearthed accurate, quantitative information, which HR professionals can use to justify the investment in training programs. To begin calculating ROI, organizations must define how much they’ve spent on L&D. Some factors to consider for an in-person training include fees for speakers, travel and lodging, and meals. It could also look at lost productivity time. For online methods, this could include the cost of the technology itself or the cost of teaching people how to use it.

Step 2: Identify what you’re going to measure

There are a number of different metrics companies can look at when trying to determine whether a L&D program is effective. A few measures that organizations use to evaluate development programs include:

Average change in performance appraisal ratings
Customer satisfaction ratings
Employee engagement survey scores
Turnover
Number of promotions
Productivity

Companies can weigh performance against industry benchmarks or their own goals. If, for example, a company wanted to improve customer service, the training could focus on best-practice customer-engagement techniques and measure hard business metrics, such as sales or conversion rates. Choosing the right factors to measure, both before (as a baseline measure) and after training, enables you to show how training has benefitted your employees or your customers.

Organizations can generate greater value from training programs and help ensure buy-in from management by connecting their training efforts to the right performance metrics. The next step is to measure the program’s impact.

A common formula for calculating ROI is to divide the expected financial benefits of the program by the program cost, then multiply by 100.

Use multiple data points over time

Your ROI analysis should include several strategies for isolating the effects of training. If you’re trying to determine, for example, whether a leadership training was effective, you might compare pre- and post-training results. You might also compare your post-training results against an organization with similar characteristics, such as budget size.

Calculating ROI also means capturing survey responses not just directly after training but over the next few months after participants have had the chance to apply what they have learned. By building ROI into a course evaluation process, planners can get continuous feedback on the course’s effectiveness and adjust as needed.

Examine non-numerical data

For some L&D programs, such as leadership training, qualitative information is extremely valuable and can carry as much influence as hard data when presenting a business case to stakeholders. Most people think of ROI solely as a number, but qualitative comments can be just as helpful and provide unique insights, especially for training managers.

When crafting a ROI strategy, companies should identify the non-numerical aspects associated with assessing a training program’s effectiveness, which can be done easily through interviews or surveys. Feedback is crucial in creating good L&D programs (especially when it’s anonymous) and can be gathered during training as well as following the event.

Building a talent development program for millennials

Though they sometimes get a bad rap, Millennials have passion, a desire to improve the world, and just as much to offer as any generation preceding them. In studies, Millennials have been shown to be mission-driven, extremely collaborative, and positive about flexible work schedules. Oh—they also prefer messaging or emailing versus picking up the phone. These traits might be different or confusing to an older generation of leaders, but hardly diminishes their contributions or potential.

Millennials are assuming management roles in increasing numbers, and will shape the landscape of how we do work for a long time to come. They make up the majority of the workforce currently, and are projected to compose over 75% of it by 2025. However, leadership development programs calibrated to their needs have not become a priority. In 2015, a study by Brandon Hall Group revealed that only 20% of organizations considered the Millennial segment critical for leadership development within the next two years. Even worse, a mere 7% of organizations invest in dedicated time for Millennials (even high potential ones) to interact with senior management.

Organizations should be preparing their next leaders to be effective through talent development. They will need capable, ready employees to assume more responsibility as the pace of change continues to accelerate and new challenges hover on the horizon. It is time now to build talent development programs tailored to the Millennial mindset. Here are some tips for doing so:

Variety through Rotational Programs

The world around them is more accessible than ever, and Millennials are curious to explore it. A survey of PwC employees showed that 37% of Millennials would like to take advantage of career opportunities abroad at their firm, versus 28% of non-Millennials. Rotational programs are a great way to meet your Millennial talents’ need for variety in their learning, while encouraging them to build lasting connections within the organization. Many large companies offer rotational programs by area of speciality (finance, HR, engineering, etc.), or specialized leadership development rotations. Entire programs typically last one to two years and involve at least two 6-month rotations either abroad, in different business units, or both. To help attendees form a more complete picture of the organization, they offer dynamic on-the-job training, supplemented with a variety of supporting activities. These programs will keep Millennials engaged with their connected, global world in a tangible way and stimulate them to greater achievements.

Mentoring and Reverse Mentoring

It bears repeating: Millennials have a strong desire for mentoring. 79% of them consider mentoring “crucial to career success,” and they are used to having more than one mentor. Not only do they crave feedback and coaching from their superiors, they enjoy engaging in peer or group mentoring. Millennials in talent development programs expect mentorship opportunities, and likely will value ones which can integrate into their day-to-day working life and offer real-time feedback.

Reverse mentoring is also becoming a significant part of formal mentoring programs, where Millennials can share their knowledge with other generations. By teaching what they know, they will refine their communication skills and deepen their knowledge. In turn, older generations of workers get to explore a fresh perspective and pick up new skills.

All Around Flexibility

Millennials crave flexibility in their work schedule – where they can work from home or a coffee shop, at varying hours, and so on. Though this is well-discussed and documented when it comes to managing Millennials, the PwC survey found that the desire for flexible scheduling is growing among all age groups.

Flexibility in talent development programs will also resonate well with many Millennials. Individuals come equipped with different learning styles, and a talent development program which addresses this will be more successful. Classroom learning is the traditional option, and remains somewhat effective, but can be improved upon with small group activities, site visits, and so on. There are more resources than ever as well for digital learning and collaboration that tech-savvy Millennials should find useful. Viewing and discussing TED talks, shadowing colleagues, attending seminars, and working on stretch assignments are all even more supplemental ways to stimulate Millennials and encourage their growth.

Data Analysis Skills

The rise of big data is changing everything, and will only continue to do so at larger scales and faster speeds. While harnessing big data can be powerful, future managers must be skilled and trained to do so effectively. Understanding how to slice and dice raw information then critically analyze it is becoming important to every department from HR to Marketing to Finance. Though advanced technical skills in data analysis are not always necessary, Millennials stand to benefit from some level of extra education in this area.

Learning could take place via online learning tools, peer mentoring/instruction by internal experts, formal coursework, or even via free resources like LinkedIn Learning. As always, having multiple options will appeal to Millennials. A data-savvy leader with these data skills will be better prepared to make use of the growing number of metrics at their fingertips and take informed actions.

Independent Decision-Making

Though Millennials excel at collaboration and cooperative work, as they rise into more prominent positions they must be prepared to sometimes make tough calls alone. They generally possess strong critical thinking skills, but should also be equipped with specific tools and training to make decisive choices they can feel secure about. Millennials in general as younger people may need practice in these situations to move through them with the confidence of experience. Group role-playing activities, analyzing case studies, and supervised leadership assignments are all ways for Millennials to access their own unique voice and make decisions individually which reflect their values. As they refine their personal guiding principles and get used to applying them in their work, they will move forward as authentic leaders.