7 Signs It's Time to Invest in a Mentoring Platform

As employees flock to new opportunities, strategies to keep them and increase retention rates are rising to the top of the priority list for CEOs, HR leaders, and department managers across all industries.

If you're looking for ways to attract top talent, improve employee engagement, increase employee growth, and improve retention rates, you've likely thought about how establishing a company mentorship program can help.

There's a lot to getting your program off the ground though, and beyond that, you have to manage it for the long term to really see the benefits. Managing mentorship programs can take a lot of work, and at a certain point, to ensure their scalability and success, it does become beneficial to invest in a mentoring platform.

In this article, we'll explore the signs that you're ready to invest in mentoring platform software to take your program to the next level.
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What is mentorship platform software?

When running mentorship programs, there are a lot of moving parts, and it can be difficult to keep track of every aspect of your program. Equally, running a mentorship program can be time-consuming if you attempt to run everything manually.

A quality mentor software will take over the hard work for you, allowing you more time to focus on other things.

Mentoring software can help you set up and make the most of your mentoring program, quickly and accurately match mentors and mentee (This could link to an article on how the AI matching service works and what the benefits are), and make sure the program runs smoothly throughout. In addition, you can create pathways through the program with gentle nudges and guidance to ensure the best experience possible.

With full tracking of progress, reports on everything from KPIs and participant feedback to your return on investment, mentoring software really can make all the difference to a well-run, successful program.
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Signs you need a mentoring platform to manage your mentorship program

It’s not easy running mentorship programs manually. It can take up a lot of hours every week that administrators could use for other things. Instead of attempting to manage everything with spreadsheets and spending hours on matching up participants, administrators can more easily reap the benefits of mentoring by investing in the right mentoring platform to run their program.

Here are just some of the signs that you may need the help of a quality mentor software:

1) A poor mentorship experience

Top of the list has to be the possibility that your mentoring program isn’t well run (Why mentoring programs fail could be another MentorCloud blog) and you’re getting poor feedback from mentors and mentees alike.

A study in the Journal of Vocational Behavior looked at the subject ‘Are bad experiences stronger than good ones in mentoring relationships? Evidence from the protégé and mentor perspective.’ One of the conclusions they came to was that “…negative mentoring experiences can have a disproportionately strong effect on mentee performance, productivity, retention, and emotional state compared to high-quality mentoring experiences.”

This poor experience may be because of missed appointments, lack of direction, poor matching, or even from vital information slipping through the cracks.

No one wants that to be the case with their mentoring program, and if you’re beginning to get complaints from your participants, it could be time to invest in software that will create a better, smoother, and more satisfying experience.

2) Running the program takes up too much time.

When you only have ten or twenty participants, management of your mentorship program is relatively easy. But when the number creeps up into the hundreds and beyond, it can become impossible to keep up with everything that needs to be done.

With time pressures from upper management and quite often the need to do more with less, it can feel like a mentorship program is too much effort.

However, the benefits of mentoring far outweigh any difficulties in managing a program, especially when so much of the effort can be taken away from administrators, simply by using the right software. A successful mentorship program is one that allows knowledge transfer to occur beyond a few and to the entire organization. 

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3) Difficulties in matching participants

As we mentioned above, when you only have a small number of participants, it’s relatively easy to manage your program. As numbers increase, however, it can take up more and more time and effort just to match your mentees up with the right mentor.

Not only that, but it may be the case that you get an increase in mismatches that don’t benefit either the mentee or the mentor.

With AI-driven mentor-mentee matching, a professional mentoring platform can take this task off your hands, free up time, and create a better result.

4) Lack of clear or easy reporting

If you’re trying to juggle multiple spreadsheets and pieces of software to create reports and work out your ROI, there’s a good chance you’re missing at least some of the pieces of the puzzle. You don’t get an overall picture of what’s happening in your mentoring program with piecemeal measuring of results.

Not only that, but it takes more time to sign into multiple programs and more time to collate the results and put them together as a report.

A high quality Mentoring software includes proper reporting that gives you a clear and accurate picture of how your program is performing, where you can adjust for better results, and how your program is benefiting your company.

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5) No scalability

There’s only so far you can grow your mentoring program with manual management. Without adding to the staff you need to manage everything, it simply isn’t possible to grow.

With mentoring software in place, it doesn’t matter if you have ten participants or thousands. You can still make it work in a smooth and efficient way.

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6) It’s more difficult to get and collate feedback

Good feedback is vital to ensure your mentoring program is on the right track and in providing a satisfying experience for everyone. If you’re attempting to send out manual surveys to hundreds of participants and then collate the answers into anything meaningful, you could be wasting time.

The right mentorship software can collect your feedback for you and give you a far better idea of how you can improve your program.

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7) Poor communication

Imagine attempting to manage hundreds of mentor/mentee meetings and tasks every month by hand. It would be an administrative nightmare. The chances of lack of communication, missed messages, and missed meetings would be far too high.

If this is you, then not only are you wasting time, but running a mentorship program in this way could potentially damage the program and cause dropouts.

With a mentoring platform, you don’t have to worry about communication and arranging meetings for participants. Everything is done automatically within the software for a smooth experience and higher completion rates.

If you’re struggling to manage your mentorship program, then why not get help from the professionals at MentorCloud and see what our quality mentoring platform can do for you. Book a demo today.

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