Many people believe that employee mentoring is a perk or a benefit offered to employees. In fact, mentoring not only helps the particpants involved with their career paths, but employee mentoring helps improve YOUR business.
4 ways employee mentoring will help your business:
1. Because of the personal relationship developed between a mentor and a mentoree, the mentor typically feels a greater loyalty to the organization. More importantly, both mentor and mentoree will have a vested interest in the company’s success.
2. Using mentoring to cross-pollinate between departments increases the organization’s success by breaking down barriers and increasing knowledge share. Mentoring is a great way to break down the “silo mentality”.
Investopedia defines silo mentality this way: An attitude found in some organizations that occurs when several departments or groups do not want to share information or knowledge with other individuals in the same company. A silo mentality reduces efficiency and can be a contributing factor to a failing corporate culture.
A mentoring program will significantly decrease the chance of silo mentality to take place in your organization.
3. Mentoring provides knowledge sharing to occur between mentor and mentoree. The talent that exists in an organization is often under-utlizied. People in the organization can use that talent but don’t know how to access it because they don’t know how to get it. Mentoring is a great way of sharing knowledge, experience, and expertise.
4. As a tool for development, mentoring allows a mentoree to tap into the expertise of others who have “been there, done that.” Mentoring allows your employees to easily identify who has what skills and expertise so they can learn from one another. This may help to avoid costly mistakes that are made by people who are new to a department or to an organization.
Can you think of other ways that employee mentoring can help businesses?