Professional mentorships are critical to employee growth and organizational success. Mentor-mentee relationships often develop naturally in traditional office settings, but a lack of casual interactions might make it difficult to develop these meaningful bonds in a remote workplace. Therefore, remote (and hybrid businesses!) need to make arrangements for facilitating mentor relationships. This blog will explore three actionable ways to help you nurture these relationships in remote settings.
Importance of professional mentorship
Employing mentorship programs at work will benefit mentors as well as mentees at your organization – the retention rate of mentors is 20% higher than peers without mentors. Employees who mentor are also likely to be promoted six times more compared to those who do not. Mentees, likewise, are five times more likely to be promoted than their counterparts. Similarly, the retention rate of mentored employees is 72%, compared with only 49% of non-mentored employees.
A survey conducted by Olivet Nazarene University in 2019 found that while only 37% people currently have mentors, a whopping 76% consider professional mentorship important or very important. So how do we close this gap?
It starts with a workplace-wide understanding that mentorship is more than just guidance. It’s about empowering employees, polishing their skills, and nurturing their inner leadership abilities. Renowned researchers and philosophers such as Vygotsky, Rogoff, and Bruner have long favored mentoring as an immense learning experience, and we know that one proven way to develop the leadership abilities of present and future employees is through professional mentorship.
Professional mentorship, along with leadership development opportunities, can lead you to build a workplace full of empowered, impactful individuals, making your company even more productive and profitable, with lower employee turnover to boot!
Sponsorship versus mentorship
Quick quiz! What’s the the difference between sponsorship and mentorship? A mentor is someone who advises a protégé, answers questions, and plans career moves and professional development, whereas a sponsor is someone who endorses a protégé to others to specifically boost the protégé's career. You can say that while mentorship consists of advising, sponsorship involves advocating too.
Now that you can confidently talk about mentorship and why you need it in your workplace like, yesterday, how do you implement a successful mentorship program?
(Hint: you can start with programs that can help you generate higher job satisfaction and demonstrate greater commitment among your employees.)
Actionable tips to promote mentorship programs at work
Promote mentorship among employees in a remote work environment with the following!
1. Create a mentorship match program
Implementing a structured mentoring matching program helps guarantee that your employees find appropriate mentors who share their interests and professional objectives. To connect mentors and mentees based on their professional backgrounds, abilities, and objectives, you can use surveys and interviews.
Tip – You must have well-defined goals for your professional mentorship program before you start matching, like increasing employee satisfaction, talent retention, or promotion rates. Organizations that lack a defined objective in the matching process tend to make a lot of assumptions about what criteria to match, rather than connecting the criteria to the program's organizational goals. This might result in poor matches, unhappy participants, minimal engagement, and ultimately a waste of time for all parties involved.
Benefit: This approach makes it more likely that mentees and mentors will have a compatible career path and facilitates mentees' acquisition of information and useful job experience.
Challenge: There may still be a mismatch in individual values, which may mean the relationship may not be a productive learning experience for both parties. To lessen these problems, you can give the mentorship pairings a trial run and allow for any necessary revisions and re-pairings.
2. Host virtual mentorship events and workshops:
Arrange virtual events like networking, panel discussions, and professional mentorship workshops. These gatherings can offer mentors and mentees the chance to interact, exchange stories, and gain knowledge from one another in an informal work setting.
Tip – We recommend prioritizing the use of a webcam to facilitate these events and encouraging participants to utilize the screen where the webcam is oriented, as eye contact is a crucial communication technique, instead of relying on a second-monitor or staying off-cam. Fostering a more natural atmosphere will increase participation and, eventually, lead to better communication.
Benefit: These events help to build a sense of community, offer opportunities for learning, and give mentees the chance to learn from a variety of mentors.
Challenge: It can be difficult to guarantee high levels of engagement and participation in virtual events. To combat this, you should extensively promote the events in advance, produce interesting content, and use interactive features like breakout rooms and Q&A sessions to drive active participation.
3. Leverage technology for regular check-ins:
Make use of chat services, video conferencing features, and collaborative software to enable mentors and mentees to regularly check-in with each other. Plan regular online meetings to run your mentorship programs at work smoothly.
Tip – Mentees can share their progress, talk about obstacles, and get feedback at these meetings, which keeps them motivated and makes them feel important.
Benefit: You can foster a solid connection, provide continuing support, and track the mentee's progress through regular check-ins.
Challenge: Time zone variations and hectic schedules make frequent meetings challenging. Encouraging scheduling flexibility and use of asynchronous communication technologies such as email or shared documents to provide updates can help address this issue.
Summary
While creating professional mentorship in a remote work setting has its own set of problems, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Organizations can foster effective mentor-mentee relationships by adopting organized programs, employing technology, and hosting engaging virtual events. Utilize online learning platforms like PowerUp for the successful implementation of mentoring and leadership development programs.
We’re here to help you design successful mentorship programs at work that also take into account the particular requirements of remote work. Embrace these techniques, and observe how your team prospers in an encouraging, collaborative, and growth-oriented remote work atmosphere.
