In a recent survey, 72% of high performing workers were likely to solicit feedback in one-on-one meetings with their supervisors. These high performers thrived in an environment of substantive communication to advance and complete their job responsibilities.

Are you shaping your company dynamic to facilitate workplace mentoring?

It’s not just high achievers who benefit from the opportunity to reach out to and connect with senior or more experienced employees. A company benefits, too, from workplace mentorship as knowledge goes from the minds of the few into the collective brain of its workforce. By creating and actively encouraging a workplace mentorship program, you can greatly reduce the ill effects of company brain drain that can occur when key employees leave the workplace.

Every company has a certain amount of information that can be captured on paper and transmitted through training sessions. And, by this time, most companies utilize these types of tools in one format or another, from employee handbooks to virtual meetings with demonstration screens.

But the kind of information and learning that we’re talking about in regards to “workplace mentoring” is not readily reduced to training manuals. It is the kind of knowledge that comes from experience, and quite often it involves company history, associated projects, external sources of information and supplies, and prognostication of potential outcomes. In short, mentoring within a company frequently involves how to make critical decisions for the best possible outcomes.

Companies can structure workplace mentorship programs in a variety of ways. In some companies, the mentors are retirees. In others, employees within a few years of retirement, who may be ramping down into part-time or consulting-based work for the company. Still others use Human Resources personnel to create a matrix of rotation through various mentors for recent hires to gain exposure across company departments.

Whatever the approach to the workplace mentorship program, the critical element is the communications platform. Arguably, any platform will do. However, a specialized mentoring platform quickly becomes preferable, when you account for differences in technology capabilities, decreased efficiencies through cross-platform communication, and the absence of a guiding hand in non-company sponsored modes of communication.

When companies use a specialty mentoring communication platform, like the one offered by Mutual Force, it gains the mechanics to foster a workplace mentorship program. Not only will mentor-mentee communication become measurably easier, the company administrator will have the means to facilitate and encourage the development of the mentor-mentee relationship.
About Us: We provide innovative web based mentoring platform for organizations. Learn more at http://mutualforce.com.