Pointers to HR- Supporting Mentoring As a Culture

If HR wants to establish a mentoring culture within the organization, here are some proven mentoring best practices.

•Set organizational goals. Don’t establish a mentoring program just because it is a good business practice. Develop a mentoring program based on solid business goals such as increasing diversity or making your organization a better place to work.

•Find out why the talented employees you wanted to keep left you. Talented employees want exciting challenges and great development opportunities. They leave because they are bored. Mentoring is a key to attracting and retaining talented employees.

•Develop people to their fullest potential. In order to develop your people, provide training opportunities, challenging projects and assignments, feedback, coaching and mentoring. In one study with people who had experienced real mentors, half of them said the mentoring experience “changed my life.” Those are powerful words.

•Foster mentoring for women and minorities. Ten years ago, when I began a new job, I sat with female colleagues during company presentations, and wondered, “Why are the guys up there and we’re not?” One of my first job assignments was to develop and manage a mentoring program. We included a special group mentoring program for women. Today, many of the young women I knew ten years ago at that company, have, in fact, climbed onto the stage themselves. Mentoring helped move women into the ranks of vice president, senior vice president and division president.

•Point to the money. Losing talented employees and wasting talent costs companies money.
Two points that are often missed by most HR departments when it comes to spreading the mentoring culture, but are really important from an employee perspective are:

•Allowing mentoring to continue past retirement. The trait most attributed to older employees is the willingness to give maximum effort. These employees are also rated as highly results-driven, very likely to retain what they learn; and low on their need for supervision. Many of the older employees plan to work at least part-time past the traditional retirement age. These characteristics demonstrate eager workers who may be well suited to be brought back as consultants and mentors after their retirement.

•Ensuring that the mentoring is compatible with people’s values and work style. Mentoring involves being collegial, talking, sharing (not telling), and developing solutions together. It is also optimistic, which is typical of most employees. We’ve found that when generations work together in strategic, business-related activities such as mentoring, everyone benefits. The mentee builds new business knowledge, and the mentor often gets reenergized and reengaged in business opportunities. We find unique satisfaction in nurturing these synergistic relationships.

-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net