Employee retention, engagement, and optimization are challenges for businesses of all sizes and across industries. In addition to the pandemic-caused mass experimentation with remote-hybrid work and the ongoing concerns of poor employee engagement and burnout, several sectors are now matching historic highs in employee turnover. Dubbed as the “Great Resignation,” firms in a variety of industries are having problems maintaining and optimizing valuable employees.
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Systemic bias and a lack of diversity in business leadership positions complicate the challenge of enhancing a company’s performance even further. During the last 18 months, high-profile incidences of racism and institutional discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and Other People of Color (BIPOC) and other minority groups have brought to light the basic challenges that afflict our institutions in both the public and commercial sectors. Employees, customers, and business partners are putting pressure on firms to address the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels of the company.
Enterprise stakeholders have the chance to address many of the diversity– and personnel-related problems they now face thanks to mentoring programs and cutting-edge solutions like mentoring software. Yet, in order to properly comprehend how mentoring enhances organizational diversity and employee engagement, it is crucial to comprehend these two key ideas: mentoring, as well as DEI practices.
Mentoring and Diversity
Mentorship offers a positive feedback loop that helps increase the efficacy of mentoring programs because of the favorable effects it has on varied representation within the corporate context. This indicates that, in addition to being benefited by mentoring programs, more minority leadership presence enhances the effectiveness of the mentoring project itself.
Engage Mentoring, led by founder Alison Martin and Yalonda Brown, president of diversity initiatives, found a solution for it. They provide a scalable platform, ranging from best-in-class software to newly launched mentorship services, that can assist companies in eliminating the logistical challenges of mentorship. Thus, dramatically increasing the organizational benefits realized from assisting employees to help each other.
According to the co-founder of Engage Mentoring, Yalonda Brown, “When we talk to organizations about why mentoring matters. We encourage them to look at it through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which drive a culture of belonging. Our mission is to help organizations grow inclusive cultures. Diversity itself doesn’t equate to success, but having access to meaningful, diverse connections through mentorship is a foundational aspect of growing individuals and growing culture.”
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How Engage Helps Merge Diversity and Mentorship
It may be quite challenging for mentors and mentees to find time for those crucial sit-downs that serve as the cornerstone of effective mentorship due to the rapid development of new technology and the fast pace of business. This is especially true for minority personnel, who confront additional cultural and systemic impediments to development. When you include the possibility of remote employment, DEI mentorship appears to be all but impossible.
The Engage Mentoring application connects people across a wide range of topics. They might be professional needs or areas of competence, or they could be personal hobbies. Engage Mentoring reinforces its software with quarterly group mentoring meetings where speakers encourage group involvement and ideation about potential new paths of professional investigation, which may subsequently lead to new mentorship directions. The way Involve Mentoring allows individuals to be both mentors and mentees is perhaps the most intriguing. This dual position fosters leadership potential in both parties and avoids the typical trap of mentors feeling obligated to preach in a one-way relationship.
“By leveraging our technology to implement a formalized mentoring program for our clients’ employees,” says Alison Martin, “a commitment of just one to two hours per month can yield incredible results. That’s why we have over 90% engagement with our platform and our Net Promoter Score is 73 in an industry where the average is 36.”
How to Measure the Success of Mentorship
Martin highlights one crucial issue: clients frequently notice how the cultural change took off in earnest when mentees realized who their resources were. Although every client has distinct goals, concerns, and time frames for their intended results, Martin stresses one item in particular. At that time, a mentorship culture emerges, and individuals begin to perceive a route to progress. In turn, mentors develop a personal interest in the people they are guiding and work harder to advance the company. Many executive councils make the erroneous assumption that everyone understands and uses mentorship. This is not backed up by data. This is why the curriculum offered by Engage Mentorship is so important and useful.
“We have data around the number of hours spent in mentorship relative to how much people felt they moved the needle in their skill development,” says Alison Martin in the email. “We can also collect data on retention, promotability, and DEI metrics, and look at those in the present versus what we saw as an original baseline. But some of this is softer science, like how well the culture embraces mentoring and how employees judge their own increases in topic proficiency.”
Engage Mentoring has launched two mentorship programs, one for HR professionals and another for DEI experts. HR and diversity professionals are responsible for the growth of their workers, but they seldom get the opportunity to acquire perspective via mentorship for themselves. These new initiatives allow for peer group mentoring as well as 1:1 mentoring. Both programs are SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) accredited.
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