With unemployment sinking to historic lows, retaining top talent is more important – and more challenging – than ever before. To encourage retention, companies are beginning to invest in onboarding, additional training and mentoring programs. The latter, in particular, has been helpful.
Mentoring programs are often introduced following onboarding. For best results, seasoned employees are paired with new recruits. This mentorship is designed to last for weeks, months or even years, depending on the needs and preferences of the company.
A whopping 70 percent of employees are unhappy or disengaged at work. If you aren’t designing programs to reverse that trend, will your top performers stay with your company in the long run? Here are three major reasons to create a mentoring program for your employees.
Improved Engagement
Recent studies have produced staggering insights about engagement, including:
- 90 percent of leaders believe an engagement strategy can improve business, but less than 25 percent of these leaders actually have a strategy.
- Less than 40 percent of employees interviewed knew about the goals, strategies, and tactics of their company.
- Companies with high engagement levels earned, on average, 250 percent more than companies with low engagement levels.
- Engaged employees were 87 percent less likely to leave their company than their disengaged counterparts.
A mentorship program can provide information about company goals, strategies, tactics, and expectations – thus leading to higher levels of engagement. The benefits of boosted engagement include an improved bottom line, more employee retention and stronger business growth.
Stress and Anxiety Reduction
Having someone to communicate with in the office can significantly reduce anxiety and stress, especially for new employees. We all make mistakes, which can be concerning. A mentor can put these mistakes into focus, calming our fears and making it easier to focus on improvement.
Since most employees make the same mistakes during their first months on the job, a mentoring program can eliminate the need for management to deal with the same problem over and over again. It can also drastically reduce the number of repeat questions.
Company Networking
There are few things more important to employee retention than culture and networking. A mentoring program provides a network boost for new recruits, as mentors often introduce current employees to mentees.
Mentors also share essential information about company culture with new recruits, sometimes without knowing it. The culture of your company includes the unspoken rules of the workplace, which outline what actions are acceptable and what actions are punished.
For example, do you allow employees to use their phone at work? Is music acceptable? What instructions given during training are less-than-necessary on the floor?
Employees can’t gather this information from managers, who turn to training and textbooks for answers. Mentors are the perfect conduit for cultural knowledge, since they’ve been there before.
At PMO Partners, we understand your need to retain skilled employees. Contact us today to learn more about our recruitment solutions for project management professionals.