Lis Merrick explores how organisations use mentoring to support employee engagement and retention
The focus on employee engagement and retention in the past 10 years has developed because of the shortage of talent in some parts of the workforce.
The ‘war for talent’, as it is sometimes described, has highlighted the lack of skilled and experienced people available and encouraged employers to really concentrate on fostering employee engagement and motivation.
Benefits of employee engagement
Research has demonstrated that engaged employees increase profit, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, staff retention, efficiency and health and safety performance. Specifically, the Engage for Success paper, Employee Engagement: The Evidence’, highlights the evidence for the effectiveness of employee engagement strategies in improving performance, productivity and, in the private sector, profitability.
So how does mentoring support employee engagement and retention?
In many evaluation reports, it is evident that an effective mentoring relationship creates a context and outputs, which are intrinsic to building a stronger bond between the employee and their organisation:
- Role modelling of leadership by the mentor gives a strong strategic narrative about the organisation and its direction to the mentee.
- A demonstration of the organisational values by the mentor, ie, what we say is what we do and a sense of fairness and justice is often showcased.
The converse of this also occurs in organisations where the values in use are different to those espoused and engagement is created by the collusion of the mentor and mentee over the predominant values being used and the mentee feels a sense of belonging to the dominant values that a powerful mentor may demonstrate.
- The affirmation the mentee feels from the relationship and motivation and support with their development.
- The sense that the organisation values the mentee by giving them a senior mentor and wanting to invest in their future.
- Providing a safe space where the mentee can explore if they want to stay with their employer – a conversation that would be extremely difficult to have with most line managers. However, this is one that can often strengthen the resolve of the mentee to stay or leave, if handled well.
- Finally, 50% of US employees leave their organisations due to their line managers, according to a recent US Gallup Report.
Harvard Business Review in ‘Why people quit their jobs?’ confirm this as one of the three reasons people leave their jobs, the other two being not having any development, or just getting a better job. Having a mentor who can provide a sounding board around a difficult line manager relationship and support with coping strategies can make an enormous difference to an employee’s engagement.
Often, greater engagement and retention are just byproducts of a mentoring programme. For example, the evaluation of a private sector senior talent programme in the UK with 22 pairs working together over the year, revealed in the final evaluation interviews that five of the mentees had decided not to leave the organisation during the programme because of the support they had received from their mentors. An amazing ROI from one small programme.
- Next issue: How organisations are making increasing use of ‘flash mentoring’
- Lis Merrick is a consultant specialising in mentoring programme design and development. She welcomes correspondence on anything to do with mentoring. Contact: Lismerrick@coachmentoring.co.uk
References
- B Rayton, T Dodge and G D’Analeze, Employee Engagement: The Evidence, Employee Engagement Task Force ‘Nailing the Evidence’ Workgroup, Engage for Success, University of Bath School of Management/Marks & Spencer, 2012
- Gallup Report – The State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, 2015
- ‘Why people quit their jobs’, in Harvard Business Review, September 2016