How Workplace Mentoring Can Improve Employee Retention
The average UK employee will change jobs every five years (BBC), with the average millennial tending to job-hop as often as every 2 years (Independent).
This shift toward frequent staff turnover makes it increasingly difficult for business to encourage their most valued employees to stick around for the long haul.
Here are the top 4 reasons why employees leave their jobs, and how a workplace mentoring program can help with employee job satisfaction.
Lack Of Development Opportunities
Nowadays, changing jobs is seen by many as a necessary means of progressing yourself personally and professionally. Gone are the days when you would graduate, find a job, and stay there long enough to collect your gold watch.
The view of millennial professionals is that to move up, you must move around. Often this is down to a lack of development opportunities that allow employees to progress within organisations.
If a company wants to retain their very best employees, they need to show that they care about their goals and ambitions. A workplace mentoring programme is a great way to invest in the untapped potential of your employees, as well as ensuring that they feel heard, and encouraged.
Bad Management
In a report by Employee Benefits looking at employee retention, management issues were found to be one of the top reasons why people leave their jobs.
They found that often this was because employees felt undervalued and experienced a lack of support from their bosses.
Granted, sometimes you really do just have a ‘horrible boss’. But bosses are busy people. And often, the lack of tailored encouragement that a manager can personally provide to their individual employees is the unintentional result of time constraints.
A workplace mentoring programme provides a second figure of support, all the while showing that management are taking active steps to aid in their employees’ personal and professional development.
Not Enough Feedback
This goes hand in hand with a lack of development opportunities. Feedback is crucial for the growth and development of employees.
No one wants to be kept in the dark. So, if a company is keen to keep hold of their best employees, they need to be providing consistent, purposeful, and constructive feedback. Employees want to be told where they can improve, and they want to be praised for the successes.
Feedback helps employees advance along some kind of trajectory. Without feedback, employees are likely to feel that they are stagnating in the role, and it will only be a matter of time before they are looking for something new.
Workplace mentoring not only provides opportunities for feedback, it provides opportunities for tailored, honest, and high-quality feedback that is hard to get elsewhere. A mentor takes time to understand the mentee’s strengths and weaknesses, and enthuses them to work toward personalised goals.
Corporate Culture
In a survey by Hayes including 2,000 employees, corporate culture was cited as the main reason that participants were looking for a new job.
The values, priorities, and overall environment of a company plays a huge role in employee satisfaction. A culture that is too corporate, political, or hierarchical is a sure-fire way to leave your employees feeling ostracised and undervalued.
Implementing a mentoring and coaching culture into the workplace can completely transform the way employees feel about their jobs, and their place within the company.
