Organizations looking to improve productivity, boost employee engagement and reduce turnover rates often turn to workplace mentoring programs as tools to help. That’s because mentorships have been proven to work. And that’s why over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs in their workplaces. 

One of the essential keys to success for these programs is the matching of mentors and mentees. Suppose you are able to get the right match between your participants. In that case, you can unlock the benefits of mentorship, including expanding employee skillsets, increasing their loyalty to your company, and cultivating an engaging and positive atmosphere at work. 

How to get a good mentor-mentee match

Finding the right mentor-mentee match depends a lot on the goals of your mentoring program. For example, if your goal is to onboard new hires, you’ll want to match them with a senior employee who can show them the ropes. The mentor would ideally be from their department or section of your organization and one who has developed good working habits. However, if your goal is to cultivate a more inclusive workplace, you may want to match a mentee with a mentor that is quite different from them. By matching a mentee with a mentor from another section of the organization or even a different background or gender, you can help them build understanding, which leads to acceptance. 

Ultimately, you’ll need to develop a matching process that is streamlined, efficient, and reliable. While manual matching gives you the feeling of being in absolute control over the matching, it is time-consuming and not a practical way to run a workplace mentoring program for larger organizations.  Mentoring software like Together simplifies the matching process while enabling you to maintain control over the criteria for matches. Moreover, there are several ways that mentoring software can make a match. 

Using mentoring software for matching

Using mentoring software for matching does not mean the computer is in control. With Together, there are different ways you can use the software to match mentors and mentees. Depending on your program and the goals you have for it, you can allow a mentee to pick their match, have an administrator select and match participants, or use the software’s algorithm to create matches quickly. 

Your mentoring program can be managed end-to-end, from registration to reporting. Not only does it save you (as an admin) time, but it also provides visibility to data to show the impact. 

For more information, check out this article: How mentor matching software works