Top Ten Tips for... Effective staff development through Mentoring

Top Ten Tips for... Effective staff development through Mentoring

Employee development is key to any industry, and workplace mentoring can be a powerful tool in ensuring its success. Read our top ten tips for effective staff development through mentoring below.

  1. Assign a mentor

Onboarding is an excellent opportunity to assign relevant mentors, helping to ensure that new members of staff have someone to turn to at the very start of their journey with the new organisation. This has been shown to help new recruits more quickly embrace the organisation’s culture and to learn elements of their new role faster.

  1. Offer career mentoring:

The benefit of career mentoring is two-fold, it can help the business retain valuable employees who are keen to develop within the organisation but also has personal benefit to the employee

Related: Retaining Great Employees

  1. Cultivate potential leaders:

Strengthening the loyalty of an employee who stands out as having leadership potential, by supporting and recognising their skills within the workplace, will help the organisation retain exceptional staff. Help to keep their interest by pairing them early with mentors who will help foster their role potential.

  1. Reverse mentoring

Reverse mentoring – when a more inexperienced employee serves as a mentor to their more senior co-worker (rather than the other way round which is the more traditional) can help more senior employees identify their own personal knowledge gaps and opportunities for development.

  1. Diversity mentoring

Diversity can, and should, be celebrated by practicing inclusivity, and by encouraging diversity mentoring a company can create a workplace where employees feel able to share their opinions and cultural knowledge for the benefit of the overall organisation.
 

  1. Develop mentoring circles

When two or more employees with similar interests and goals work together in a peer-to-peer mentoring format for mutual success, it is called a mentoring circle. This approach is useful in helping employees to successfully collaborate, share their knowledge, and build their own personal, and shared, skill sets.
 

  1. Mentoring ambassadors

mentoring can be an exciting opportunity for those interested, so consider rewarding those who show the most enthusiasm about getting involved in any initiatives. Recognise keen team members by making them Mentoring Ambassadors and enlist them in starting up, shaping and developing any in-house programmes.
 

  1. Gather feedback:

A key element of a successful employee mentoring programme is continual assessment and refinement of the processes and practices. This will ensure both the employees and organisation gain the maximum benefit from any initiative.
 

  1. Make space for failure and learning

Growth is often achieved through failure so be sure to give team members space to develop and let them know that it’s actually OK to fail. A good mentor is key and will help employees identify how they can learn from their mistakes and use the knowledge as an opportunity to further develop.
 

  1. Ask mentees to explain things to their mentors:

Encourage those being mentored to make sure they fully understand not only what they’re doing, but why, so that they can explain their reasonings behind why they reached any conclusions and in turn strengthen their knowledge and confidence.

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