How Startups Can Develop a Mentorship Program for Employees

As a new business, you’ve spent many hours creating job descriptions, plowing through resumes, interviewing candidates, onboarding them, and training them for their new positions.

That’s a lot of time and money invested, so you want to retain your new staff for the long haul. One way to help create employee loyalty is to provide them with a mentor.

In this article, we look at how startups can develop a mentorship program for employees.

Define Your Objective

Before you begin your mentorship program, you first need to decide what your goals are. Some ideas include:

• One goal might be to teach employees new skills.
• Another goal might be departmental collaboration.
• Yet, another objective might be onboarding over the course of several months.
• You might also decide to have a mentorship program to boost employee morale.
• It might also be in your best interest to have a mentorship program to increase professional development.

Overall, your goal should be to not only attract the best employees but to retain them over the years.

Choose Your Delivery Method

The next thing to consider is how you’ll deliver your mentorship program. What will its format be? Here are a few options for you to choose from:

• One-on-one mentoring with an older and younger employee.
• Group mentoring with one mentor and several mentees.
• Peer mentoring is a relationship with people at the same job level. For example, two managers can participate in peer mentoring.
• Reverse mentoring is another option with a younger team member mentoring a senior employee. This works well when technology is involved.
• Team mentors can be similar to group mentoring, but instead of one mentor, you have several.
• Supervisory mentoring is the classic relationship between boss and staff member. This might happen once a week or even once a month.

Whichever option you use, set it up across the board so that everyone of your team members knows what to expect and what the parameters are.

For example, how often will mentors/mentees meet? Will there be written documentation of meetings, or will they be casual?

Your next step is pairing up your employees, giving them instructions, and letting them get to work.

Evaluate the Program

Finally, once you’ve got your program running, you want to evaluate how it’s going.

Check in with your mentors and your mentees. Find out what your employees think. Do they feel like they’re getting something out of the program? Do they have suggestions for improvement?

Once you have some feedback, you can then adjust your mentorship program as needed so that it works for all of your team members.

When evaluating, you also want to revisit your goals and objectives. Ask yourself if the program is meeting them. If not, it’s time to revise and re-evaluate.

You may find it takes a while to get all the kinks ironed out, but once you do, you’ll find your employee culture and morale will continue to improve and grow.

Final Thoughts

If you want your new startup to be successful, one way to help ensure your vitality is by hiring the right employees, meeting their needs, and helping them succeed.

You’ll better understand your employees and their motivations by providing a structured workplace mentoring program just like the Fortune 500 companies do.

To help further emphasize the importance of mentoring, check out these statistics:

• Millennials with a mentor are twice as likely to stay with a company for more than five years.
• One study found 83% of workers who participated in a mentoring program said their experience positively influenced their desire to stay at their company.

Your startup can develop a mentorship program that positively affects both your business and your new team. Everyone wins, and your company benefits greatly.

Are you a new startup ready to succeed? Are you looking to get your new business off the ground and watch it rise to success? We are here for you. We can help answer your questions and guide you through the process. Outsource your HR duties, finances, payroll and more to us. Contact Escalon today to get started.

Image: Kobu Agency on Unsplash