Use mentoring to improve staff performance

Whether your mentoring programme is structured formally or is more informal, you should ensure you monitor, record and evaluate it in order for your business to get the most from mentoring.

Monitoring informal mentoring programmes

You can monitor an informal mentoring scheme, by getting the mentor to:

• record each meeting, what it involved and the main objectives of the activity
• record a summary of discussion and action points

Monitoring formal mentoring programmes

In more formal mentoring programmes, you can monitor the programme by:

• training the mentors
• considering how to match mentors to mentees
• issuing guidelines as to what mentoring involves
• understanding when mentoring would be effective
• setting up contractual arrangements where necessary
• developing a system to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme

It is good practice to measure the progress of the mentoring relationship:

• at the beginning to establish expectations
• after six months to assess how well the relationship is working
• after 12 months to measure outcomes

Evaluating a mentoring programme

It is important to evaluate your mentoring programme to ensure that it is achieving its aims. You should do this by assessing the mentors as well as the programme itself.

To evaluate the programme, you could ask all participants to give feedback on the effectiveness of the mentoring relationship.

The formats for the feedback could include:

• a simple questionnaire where the participants answer specific questions about the programme
• a written report from each participant
• an interview of each of the participants

You can evaluate the mentor in the same way. However, also consider including specific mentoring criteria as development goals for mentors.