Mentoring: An Important Aspect Of Employee Retention
Employee retention should be the focal point of every company’s HR department. This is because not only does it cost a fortune to recruit and hire new employees, but allowing your business to turn into a revolving door hurts morale and makes your business a less attractive option to industry-leading talent.
Successfully retaining employees requires a blend of strategies. You obviously need to make sure you’re compensation packages are competitive, and you need to adequately reward your employees, but you also need to pay attention to things such as company culture, corporate social responsibility, and professional development.
Essentially, people are going to stick around at a company when they feel connected to it on a deep level. And one of the ways you can help speed this process along is by offering mentoring to your employees. Here’s why this can work:
Invest In Employees’ Success
People like working for companies that are invested in their success. The burden of moving a career along is no longer entirely individual. Instead, firms are expected to help, and there is quite a bit of research out there to suggest that participation in a mentoring program leads to higher levels of success.
As a result, creating and investing in a mentoring program helps demonstrate to employees that you’re interested in helping them move their careers along, which will create stronger feelings of gratitude that translate to a dampened desire to move elsewhere.
Build Connections Among Employees
How many times have you heard someone say that they don’t love their job but they stick around because of the people? For most of us, this is probably something we hear quite often. And it makes sense, for, in the end, it’s the people we do things with that define our experiences.
Because of this, a key component of your employee retention program needs to be to try and create this connection amongst your employees. You want people to feel like they belong to a family because it will make them think twice about pursuing opportunities outside of the company.
Mentoring is great for this because it facilitates intimate connection amongst your employees. Those who receive mentoring will feel grateful for the opportunity, and it’s likely they will feel the drive to stick around so that they can mentor someone else and help them in the way someone helped them. This type of close-knit community not only saves you money when it comes to recruiting and retention, but it will also make your company an all-around better place to work, which is no doubt something we all want.
Offer Professional Development
As mentioned earlier, people these days demand that their companies help them move forward with their careers. And this means that they expect professional development to be a big part of their time with the company. They want to find out what’s being discussed in the industry, and they want to learn the skills they need to compete with their peers on the open market.
In fact, a lack of professional development is one of the main reasons why employees choose to give up their positions and move to another company. And as a business owner or leader, this just means that you need to make professional development a priority.
Offering classes, giving access to online learning portals, matching tuition, and investing in eLearning platforms are all great ways to offer your employees the tools they need to grow. But they are also quite expensive. Mentoring is an alternative that, when complemented with some formal training, can really help people feel as though they are growing, and this will help keep them from jumping online to see if there is somewhere else they would rather work.
Formal Mentoring Programs
Some mentor/mentee relationships will occur organically. Two people will form a connection, and they will use this to help one another. However, if you want to make mentoring part of your employee retention strategy, then you need to be a bit more proactive.
This means implementing a formal mentoring program where you match people within your company. This might seem a bit forced, but it’s really not. In fact, most people will find it liberating, as it removes the stress of having to approach someone on your own. This can be the professional equivalent of dating, and we all know just how terrifying that can be.
Make Mentoring a Priority Today
Mentoring will not only help individual employees get better at their jobs, it will also help them feel more connected to the company, and this type of affinity is necessary to building a strong company culture that will support your business for the many years to come. So if you haven’t already, consider implementing a mentoring program in your business today.
About the Author: Kevin Conner is the founder of Broadband Search, an online platform designed to help people find the best value internet service provider for their needs. As a young professional, Kevin was fortunate to find a mentor in his boss, and although they have gone on separate paths, he still considers him an important part of both his personal and professional life.
