Business success and growth are often defined in terms of revenue, profitability, market share, and so on. However, it is equally important to lay emphasis on the processes that lead to these outcomes. Ultimately, business organizations succeed when employees deliver extraordinary performances. All in all, businesses advance when leaders succeed in getting the best out of their employees.
This explains why a lot of contemporary organizations are investing diligently in employee experience. Business leaders are now committed to finding ways to constantly enhance the experience of employees given the great business benefits of positive employee experiences.
The idea is to create a positive work environment with high motivation, great indulgence, and exemplary determination among employees to contribute to the organization’s success.
Now, the question is, “what does it take to cultivate the kind of employee experiences that add incredible value to business success?” What are the most successful businesses doing to drive great performance from their employees in an amazingly consistent manner? Well, if you look around, most contemporary organizations are harvesting the benefits of shifting to a mentoring approach.
To elucidate, from Accenture to Microsoft, the most successful businesses are investing in thoughtful mentoring programs. In fact, you will be quite amused to know that more than 70 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list have mentoring programs for their employees.
What are the benefits of mentoring programs these businesses are relying on?
That is exactly what we are going to walk through in this detailed post on the subject. This blog will put forth the most extraordinary benefits of introducing mentoring programs in the workplace. So, let’s get started without further ado.
Table of Contents
Ways in which mentoring programs add to business success
Have you considered introducing mentoring programs into your business operations? If so, you’re headed down an excellent path. To help you get started in the right direction, we’ve put together
1. Higher engagement and improved retention
High levels of disengagement and employee turnover have always been peculiar issues for organizations. In fact, for small businesses, the failure to effectively engage and retain employees could well be the end of the road. To explain, the costs of employee turnover can be as high as USD 2.6 million per year for a company with around 100 employees on average. For sure, such hefty costs are going to be among the biggest roadblocks to the growth of your business.
On the contrary, did you know that engagement and profitability have a direct correlation? To substantiate, as per Gallup, companies with high employee engagement can be 21 percent more profitable than others. This clearly validates the integral relationship between engagement and profitability.
Do mentoring programs result in higher engagement?
With all that in mind, can mentoring programs result in higher employee engagement? Let’s take a look.
If we look at the most basic expectations of employees from their workplace, learning and development are top priorities. Employees engage better when they see their organization add great value to their learning and professional development. Needless to say, for employees, their career advancement matters immensely to them.
Having said that, when mentoring programs are introduced, employees’ loyalty and commitment to the organization increase. They look at mentoring programs as a great opportunity to upskill their professional capabilities and learn new dimensions of productivity. This investment on the part of the organization to mentor employees drives high engagement and retention. Mentoring programs deliver great satisfaction to employees’ expectations of professional development.
In fact, as per LinkedIn Learning, 94 percent of employees state that they will stay at an organization for longer if it offers great learning opportunities. Moreover, there is a large percentage of employees who are willing to quit their current jobs if there are no learning opportunities on offer. Clearly, as a business leader, you cannot ignore this correlation between development opportunities and employee retention.
Mentoring programs are tailored to coach employees in specific skills or to gain effective knowledge with respect to OKRs. Hence, the influence of intelligible mentoring programs is evident on employees in real-time. In relation to the value provided by mentoring programs, employees will reciprocate with greater curiosity, commitment, and enthusiasm to boost their performance. Subsequently, there would be a dramatic and measurable increase in engagement and retention levels. The higher the engagement the greater the business success in terms of profitability and market penetration.
2. Optimized learning experiences in the workplace
Practically speaking, how much do you think employees really learn from two to three days of training? Now that the business environment is getting enormously competitive and prerequisite skills are evolving, you can no longer rely on orthodox ways of employee training.
To ensure the effective reskilling and upskilling of your employees, learning has to be an everyday process. For employees to develop great capabilities, learning and development have to be more continuous. For new employees or inexperienced workers to match up with the pace of the competitive business world, senior executives ought to mentor them on a regular basis.
Enhanced experiences, enhanced results
The bottom line is that mentoring programs offer enhanced learning experiences to the employees. The unique propositions of mentoring programs like one-to-one mentoring, practical learning, and continuous knowledge have great potential to improve learning outcomes.
Moreover, mentoring programs will offer a more personalized way of learning to employees such that they can learn at their own pace. Also, in any organization, subordinates look at leaders and senior executives as ideal role models. Having said that, your employees will be much happier to personally learn from their supervisors. They are more comfortable in terms of learning and the indulgence in learning is pretty high when it comes to mentor-mentee arrangements.
Hence, mentoring programs offer greater efficiency in knowledge sharing backed by practical insights from experienced mentors. Employees learn at a faster pace, execute the acquired knowledge in real-time, and stand corrected by their mentors whenever needed. In the ultimate sense, mentoring programs create a natural environment of continuous learning which can have amazing benefits for any business organization.
3. Greater trust-building
As a business leader, you should already know the significance of positive working relationships in the workplace. One more thing that you need to understand is that trust is the ultimate foundation of strong working relationships. When positive relationships flourish in the workplace, there is better collaboration and teams achieve new milestones.
This is where mentoring programs offer another exceptional business benefit. Mentoring programs promote high trust in the workplace which can be a great headstart for unlocking great outcomes. To elaborate, the trust factor is much higher in mentor-mentee relationships than in supervisor-subordinate relations.
Mentees have high trust in their mentors as mentors invest their time and effort in grooming their subordinates. Mentees also have huge respect for their mentors who go out of their way to add value to their mentors’ career development. This is how high trust is promoted in the workplace leading to outstanding and productive working relationships.
Besides, as a leader, you should never underestimate the value of trust in the workplace. As per Harvard Business Review, people in high trust companies exhibit 50 percent higher work efficiency. Moreover, in high trust companies, employees manifest 76 percent higher engagement and 106 percent more energy in tasks.
As you can clearly see, a single virtue of trust can play such a key role in the advancement of a business. With effective and employee-centric mentoring programs, you can foster high trust and create a motivating workplace. It is time you explore the great potential of integrating mentorship programs in the workplace.
4. Reduction in exorbitant training costs
Almost all successful organizations pay great heed to employee training programs. If we talk about employee training costs, on average, businesses spend around USD 1300 per employee in a year. Having said that, it is quite evident that a large part of a company’s operational budget is invested in employee training.
In fact, in the present scenario, employee training and development also require state-of-the-art technologies and remote learning tools to train employees. Therefore, employee training costs are rising further. Is there a way these training costs can be reduced significantly? Again, the answer lies in mentorship programs.
How mentoring programs reduce training costs
Mentorship programs offer continuous and personalized learning. This kind of learning has a much greater impact than classroom training. When employees learn through mentorship, they can seek regular feedback and clarify their uncertainties in a regular way. Classroom training modules for sure do not offer such privilege.
Hence, well-thought and effective mentoring programs can replace quite a few traditional training modules that involve huge expenditures. This is how mentoring programs will save considerable operational costs. After all, it will be your own senior executives mentoring the new recruits and subordinates rather than paid trainers outsourced from corporate training agencies. Quite a cost-effective measure, isn’t it?
The operational expenses you save here can be rather invested in other operational dimensions to boost efficiency. After all, business success is quite synonymous with effective management of costs. Otherwise too, these cost reductions will definitely lead to amplified profits.
5. Enhanced performance management
We often talk about critical success factors in business. Performance management is surely one of them as managing individual and team performance is paramount to organizational success. Companies succeed in their business objectives when they are able to inspire unbelievable performances.
Having said that, it is quite understandable why businesses work on performance management strategies round the clock. Among these strategies, cultivating a culture of mentoring can be a phenomenal way to manage performance in effective ways. In fact, leaders can manage performances in a way like never before by fostering mentoring cultures.
Continuous feedback
To elaborate, in one-to-one mentoring arrangements, there is a great scope for continuous feedback sharing. Mentors can work with subordinates in the identification of areas of improvement and further guide them to plug the inefficiencies. Also, mentors will help employees in setting attainable and measurable goals with respect to their individual performance. Besides, mentors can also assist mentees in tracking performance goals. Thus, in mentoring arrangements, mentors and mentees will work in collaboration with each other to work out ways to boost performance efficiency incrementally.
Furthermore, organizations can also introduce employee recognition programs in correlation with mentoring programs. Leaders can initiate a robust system of appreciation and rewards to encourage employees to do well in achieving the objectives of mentoring programs. All these elements of mentoring programs can have significant positive impacts on the performance of individuals and teams. Having said that, it is fundamentally correct to say that creating a mentoring infrastructure can be an extraordinary performance management tool.
To encapsulate, in incredible and multiple ways, mentoring cultures can help organizations fix various loose ends. From augmentation in employee engagement levels to optimized performance management, there are multifaceted benefits of mentoring programs. Most importantly, mentoring programs can add ample value to workplace learning and development by fostering a natural learning environment.
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