MentorcliQ

Employee mentoring programs are on the rise. And it makes perfect sense. Baby boomers are exiting organizations with critical institutional knowledge, and millennials are entering the workforce with heightened expectations of a more engaging professional experience. Companies are scrambling for better ways to facilitate knowledge transfer while engaging and developing the next generation of employees. Mentoring holds the key.

“Until recently, companies considered mentoring as something that motivated employees found for themselves,” explains Phil George, president and CEO of MentorcliQ. “Businesses acknowledged mentoring as a good thing, but not something they were responsible for. That mentality has changed dramatically.”

Individuals have been engaging mentors and advisors for centuries to help develop a specific skill or accelerate a career. “But the organizational benefits of mentoring go far beyond personal employee development,” says George. “The engagement, productivity, and retention results linked to mentoring have now been well documented and all lead to an ROI that is impossible to ignore.” Academic and industry studies support this assertion. Employees involved in mentoring are measurably more engaged at work, more productive in their role, and more likely to stay with their current organization.

In the last decade, more companies have sponsored formal employee mentoring programs with mixed results. “Launching a mentoring program without technology is hard and will likely result in a program that fizzles out,” George says. “To succeed, you need to intelligently match people in mentoring relationships. You need to guide those employees through mentoring conversations and milestones. Relationship and program outcomes need to be measured to build executive buyin. This is where MentorcliQ can help.”

MentorcliQ’s award-winning mentoring approach and technology allows organizations to quickly launch a mentoring program, match participants, support mentoring relationships, and measure results.

“The key to a successful program is to make it easy for the mentors and mentees to get involved and stay engaged,” George explains. “Our goal is for employees to interact with our technology for 10 minutes per year in order to create 20+ hours of mentoring.” That is significant leverage.

MentorcliQ software guides candidates through an enrollment process where they answer a few questions about their background, personality, and preferences. The process takes less than five minutes. MentorcliQ then uses key dynamics from a person’s professional background, personality, and development preferences to help find them a great match within the company. Throughout the mentorship relationship, MentorcliQ enables the employee development by providing intelligent resources to the employee based on where they are in their relationship. This targeted support keeps individuals engaged and progressing towards their goals.

The key to a successful program is to make it easy for the mentors and mentees to get involved and stay engaged

Another key to MentorcliQ’s success is framing the mentoring strategy in terms of intentional mentoring programs, as opposed to formal mentoring programs. “An intentional mentoring program targets a certain population of employees to better support their specific development needs, like focusing on those in your sales group, or a group of high potentials, or a women’s network,” George says. “But the relationships themselves are still informal, which creates the best outcome. An enterprise mentoring solution emerges as companies identify their strategic goals and then create intentional programs to help the company achieve those goals.”

For example, one of MentorcliQ’s clients had an organizational goal of 40% female representation in leadership roles by 2020. In the first quarter, 250 high performing female leaders enrolled in the program and received 1,000 hours of development. MentorcliQ analytics also uncovered additional opportunities for training and support within specific development areas, which the company was able to actualize. Now, the company is on target to achieve its goal of more women in leadership by 2020.

Employee mentoring programs are attracting industries from Fortune 50 companies to small-to-medium sized organizations. MentorcliQ supports mentoring in 65 countries on 5 continents in more than 10 languages. “It’s an exciting time for mentoring technology,” George says. “Mentoring as an engagement and development strategy is exploding, and the impact to individuals and businesses is really exciting.”