Measure Mentoring Program Effectiveness with Software

There is no doubt that mentoring programs come with many benefits, including career development, increased productivity, and improved employee engagement. In fact, we have mentioned the benefits of mentoring often throughout our previous blogs. However, achieving a few benefits doesn’t necessarily mean your program is a success.

If achieving benefits doesn't determine success, then the question is - How do you measure the effectiveness of your mentoring program?

The Importance of Using Data to Discover Mentoring Effectiveness

The first step you took to create your mentoring program was setting objectives. Those objectives are intended to serve as your guide to determine if your program is effective and ultimately successful. To put it simply, for your mentoring program to be effective, it must achieve its intended objectives.

It would be nice to think that your mentoring program objectives are being achieved because your participants have been matched. However, in today’s climate you need tangible results. Remember that your mentoring program is an investment. You need to be able to present data that you are meeting your objectives.

Utilizing Mentoring Software to Collect and Measure Program Data

Collecting mentoring data from your program may seem daunting, but the right mentoring software will offer features to streamline the process.

As we’ve said, utilizing mentoring data is essential to measuring mentoring effectiveness. However, simply having access to data isn’t going to cut it. You must have the right data to align your results with your original objectives. This will show the level of your relevant success and lend to your ability to prove program success.

To ensure that you have access to the right mentoring data, you must utilize mentoring software that includes the following features….

• Goal Tracking – The goal tracking tool gives your mentors and mentees the ability to track the SMART goals set for their mentoring relationship. It also allows your program administrators to monitor the goal achievements and determine the overall success of the relationship. Your admins will also have access to the data needed to identify trends in the goals being achieved through their mentoring program.
  
  
• Login Monitoring – Use this tool to monitor how often your participants are logging into your mentoring platform. The logins tell you how often your mentors and mentees are interacting within the system. It is important to know that they are using the platform so that you can receive a worthwhile return on investment.
  
  
• Automated Communication – The communication automation tool doesn't just help you streamline your messages, it also allows to see how is opening them. See how often mentors and mentees are engaging by monitoring their open rates for your automated communications.
  
  
• Calendar Integration – This tool gives your participants the ability to scheduling meetings through software integrations with their calendars. This tool also gives you the ability to view how often these meetings are being scheduled. The most successful mentoring relationships meet consistently. To ensure that your participants are working towards your objectives, you need a scheduling tool to monitor how often they meet.
  
  
• Survey/Feedback tools – Don’t forget that your program participants satisfaction is important to your mentoring program effectiveness. If your mentors and mentees are unhappy, they will be less likely to continue to progress in the program. This will ultimately make your mentoring program ineffective.
  
  To prevent this, you need to have a way to collect feedback about your mentoring program. Responses from a survey tool enable you to collect participant feedback to see if they believe the mentoring has been effective.  

Utilizing Mentoring Software to Report Program Data

Having access to the right data is crucial to proving mentoring effectiveness, but how you present that data is just as important. The reporting tool that your mentoring software has will be just as important as the features that help you capture the data.

The Mentoring Reporting Tool

Reporting is essential to measuring mentoring effectiveness. It enables you to consistently monitor and communicate the development progress of your mentors and mentees. Unlike when tracking your program data with excel, mentoring software allows you to customize your reports to easily measure mentoring success.

Having access to a tool that was developed to create mentoring reports allows you to show tangible proof of your program’s effectiveness.

For example, if you have a virtual mentoring program, your objective may be to increase the level of remote employee engagement. To truly achieve engagement through mentoring, your participants will need to login to your mentoring software and schedule regular meetings. With this tool, you will have the capabilities to create a report with data from your login and calendar integration tools. This report will show which participants are actively engaged with your program.

No matter how you choose to measure the effectiveness of you mentoring program, you should always work with the right mentoring software service provider. Insala’s solutions can help you automate and manage your mentoring program by supporting your processes.

Request a demo to discover how Insala’s mentoring software can support the objectives for your mentoring program’s success.