A good mentorship program has many benefits. It keeps employees engaged and makes them willing to stay with the company for a longer period of time. It’s a benefit many Millennials are hoping to experience as they make their way through their professional careers. In fact, a 2016 Gallup study, How Millennials Want to Work and Live, found 87% of Millennials believe professional development is important within a job.
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And a new spin for mentorship is to have companies crowdsource it.
There’s an old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.” A crowdsourced mentorship program allows new employees to see multiple perspectives. The experiences from working with so many different mentors will increase their chances of success within the company.
Since there are a number of ways to implement it, let’s take a look at three ways a traditional mentorship program can be changed into a crowdsourced one:
1. Look Toward a Diverse Group for Mentorship.
A good mentorship program increases the chances of an employee staying with an organization for the long-haul. The 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey found 68% of Millennials with mentors were more likely to stay with their organization after 5 years. Only 32% of Millennials who didn’t have a mentor were willing to do the same.
A crowdsourced mentorship program should have participation from as many employees as possible. The diversity of employees should span across generations, departments, experience, genders, and management. Companies will want to give mentees access to many different perspectives, so the mentors need to be as varied as possible.
Mentors in the mentorship program should also be given incentives for their involvement. Those incentives can involve extra vacation days, remote working days, or a set number of free lunches at the company’s expense.
2. Determine the Timeline for Mentorship.
One of the hallmarks for a crowdsourced mentorship program is for mentees to soak up information from different perspectives. Mentees need enough time to build a relationship with a mentor, but not so long that the relationship becomes stagnant.
The timeline for mentorship depends on the mentee’s objectives. First, you want to help define those objectives with them and schedule a process.
Then, use a crowdsourced mentorship program to mix and match mentors with different work assignments that align with the mentee’s goals and advance them through the learning process. Projects should be led by members of different departments with alternating roles of responsibility. Show the mentee and their mentors each step of the process and how each deadline leads up to the final assessment.
Along the way, mentors should assess their time with the mentee and have an evaluation filled out about their time together. It will take plenty of feedback to ensure a program with this many moving parts is working smoothly. All feedback should be constructive and focused on helping everyone learn and grow.
Ultimately, each evaluation should highlight the mentee’s development and show how they are advancing toward the deadline. When their pace is falling behind what’s expected, gather all mentors together to identify what’s slowing their growth.
3. Create Additional Resources for the Mentorship Program.
The main goal of a crowdsourced mentorship program is to provide a variety of different learning experiences for mentees. The experiences of working with so many mentors will benefit mentees in the long-run, but working side-by-side is not the only way they can learn something new.
Mentors in the program should have free range to use whatever resources they can to add to the development of the mentees. Mentors can offer things like their favorite articles or additional work resources to help shape the work habits of their mentees. If mentors have a favorite YouTube video or a workplace productivity podcast, they can easily create a database of tools to share with mentees.
In the end, mentorship programs, however they’re designed, are a great way to build company loyalty within newer employees. A crowdsourced mentorship program will aid in having more confident employees who are familiar with the company culture. The hands-on development overseen by a variety of mentors will aid in building future leaders within the organization.
What are some other ways to create a crowdsourced mentorship program? Let us know in the comments below.
| Andre Lavoie is the CEO of ClearCompany, the first talent alignment platform that bridges the gap between talent management and business strategy by contextualizing employees’ work around a company’s vision and goals. You can connect with him and the ClearCompany team on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. |