Expand Mentoring to Weather Downturns

(Greenwood Village, Colorado) There is now no doubt that the U.S. economy is hitting some turbulence, creating a domino effect on the global economy and forcing organizations to make tough choices concerning employees.

A March 2008 article in Human Resource Executive Online by Louis Greenstein stated: "A survey conducted by New York consulting firm Mercer found that 33 percent of U.S. employers may implement hiring freezes or downsize their staffs due to the current economic slump"(1). However, Greenstein notes that most organizations recognize this is likely a short-term trend and they are making efforts to retain and develop their employees, especially top performers.

At Triple Creek, we are finding that among our more than 100 clients, even those facing downsizing and job freezes are expanding the use of mentoring as a retention and development strategy. In fact, mentoring may be the last thing you want to cut back on in a downturn; instead, look at expanding it!

During uncertain times, it is critical to address the personal, professional and career needs of employees, and mentoring is a proven business strategy for increasing engagement, retention and productivity.

• Research at Sun Microsystems over five years established that employees who participated in mentoring (both mentees and mentors) were five to six times more likely to be retained and promoted than employees who did not participate(2).
• Triple Creek's engagement research established that both face-to-face and distance mentoring relationships had a significant positive impact on eight factors related to increasing employee engagement(3).
• Soon-to-be-published retention and productivity research by Triple Creek indicates that for mentors and mentees who invest at least one hour per month on mentoring, 93% report that mentoring had a positive impact on factors related to retention and 89% indicate mentoring's positive impact on productivity indicators. Again, these results held true for both distance and face-to-face relationships(4).

These results continue to reinforce nearly 30 years of research on the proven benefits of mentoring(5). Moreover, web-based mentoring is proving to be a flexible, low cost way to leverage these benefits.

Both our engagement study and our new retention and productivity study reinforce that mentoring clearly sends a message that organizations are committed to personal, professional and career development. For example, 94% of respondents in our retention and productivity study either strongly agree or mostly agree that the mentoring program demonstrates their organization's commitment to providing career options and opportunities(6).

In a downturn, keeping employees motivated and engaged becomes critical. When a workforce contracts or business expands without new hires, everyone feels the crunch. Training budgets shrink, time commitments are stretched, and job demands grow. Mentoring provides a learning option where employees can tap into the knowledge resources still available in the enterprise and get the help they need on current job demands.

In that same vein, expanding mentoring can be a way to leverage the experience of your top performers. For example, following a downsizing event, organizations can immediately target their high-potentials and top performers as possible mentors in an expanded mentoring program. This allows an organization's best and brightest employees to actively shape the future of the organization and have an integral role in the success of the company.

Web-based mentoring achieves these benefits in a flexible, cost-effective and time-efficient way. Participants can achieve excellent results while investing as little as one hour per month on mentoring. Because web-based mentoring decreases administrative overhead, large groups of people can participate at a lower cost than is possible when trying to meet all of these needs through traditional training programs.

Mentoring keeps employees engaged, productive and focused on the career opportunities still available in the organization. Therefore, organizations would do well to expand the use and profile of mentoring following restructuring. As history has shown, an economic downturn may actually be the best time to expand your use of mentoring and leverage its proven value in retaining and developing your workforce. Open Mentoring presents an effective and efficient way to provide these self-directed learning opportunities even when budgets are stretched.

If your organization is already using Open Mentoring, don't hesitate to contact your account representative to discuss how to further leverage your program as your needs may change.

For those of you contemplating Open Mentoring, call our Business Development department today at 866-470-1603 to discuss your workforce development needs and to see the power of Open Mentoring for yourselves.


About Triple Creek Associates, Inc.
Triple Creek Associates, Inc. helps organizations build cultures of learning and development through web-based mentoring programs. Their flagship web-based mentoring product, Open Mentoring®, is a fully supported, comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that allows organizations to auto-match, manage and measure mentoring relationships built around customized learning projects. Triple Creek currently brings web-based mentoring and support to more than 100 market-leading organizations with users in 56 countries.


Resources:
1. Greenstein, Louis. "Uncertain Economy, Uneven Hiring," Human Resource Executive Online, March 10, 2008.

2. Triple Creek Associates (2007). "Mentoring's Impact on Mentors: Doubling the ROI of Mentoring," available online: http://www.3creek.com/resources/research/Mentor_Impact.pdf.

3. Triple Creek Associates (2007). "Employee Engagement Research," available online: http://www.3creek.com/resources/research/TCA_Engagement_Research.pdf.

4. Triple Creek Associates. "Mentoring Impact on Retention and Productivity" (working title), due for release in Spring 2008.

5. Kristic, Ian F. and Emelo, Randy (2007). "Mentoring and Organizational Justice," available online: http://www.3creek.com/resources/research/Mentoring_and_Organizational_Justice.pdf. The introduction to this paper provides a good summary of research into the benefits of mentoring.

6. Triple Creek Associates. "Mentoring Impact on Retention and Productivity" (working title), due for release in Spring 2008.

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