Online mentoring – mentoring processes conducted remotely
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Remote work has firmly settled in the business environment. Online meetings no longer surprise anyone — on the contrary, they are an everyday reality for many office employees. Can mentoring processes be carried out in the same way? What should be done to make online mentoring effective? These are the topics I will discuss in this article.
In brief
- Opening and closing the program in an on-site format and onboarding participants and monitoring increase the effectiveness of online mentoring.
- Pairs are advised to turn on the camera during meetings, agree on the format and set a place to archive materials to ensure continuity of the process.
- Ongoing monitoring of mentoring processes and organizing intervision for mentors help to quickly respond to lack of engagement.
- The Mentiway platform centralizes tools for recruiting, planning and documenting sessions and provides a Session Room, which facilitates remote work — centralizing tools and monitoring activity support process continuity. Contact Mentiway
Online contact is commonplace today
During the pandemic and lockdowns, companies had to change their `modus operandi`, and employees, especially office workers, their habits and ways of working. Today, 100% remote work is decidedly less popular; more companies are opting for a hybrid model and more employees are permanently returning to the office. According to research by pracuj.pl, in 2023 28% of employees reported working remotely or in a hybrid model, which was 6 percentage points lower than a year earlier.
What has, however, stayed with us is the acceptance, or even the habit of remote meetings. Even if employees have returned to the office, they more often accept the option of holding meetings online. This applies to both internal meetings and business meetings held between different organizations.
And what does this look like in the case of mentoring programs and processes?
Online mentoring – in a fully remote format
In mentoring, the possibility of conducting processes remotely is also an everyday reality today.
On one hand we have open mentoring programs – run within a given niche (see also the catalog of open programs). They are most often nationwide. They are available to people from many different cities across the country. Naturally, they therefore allow joining remotely.
In some cases, offline presence is recommended or mandatory for the inauguration and conclusion of such a program. Organizers invite participants to opening or closing galas, to networking, to meet their assigned partners and people with similar interests. However, in any case, the mentoring sessions themselves can most often take place remotely.
In the case of corporate mentoring, the program’s delivery format depends on how work is organized in a given organization. But from experience we know that meetings very often take a remote form. Especially since the most effective mentoring processes are those in which pairs are formed by people from different departments, branches or global locations. Then the exchange of knowledge and experience is greatest. In such cases the remote format is even required.
How can online mentoring be made effective?
When organizing a mentoring program in a remote format, it is necessary to pay attention to several matters. Below we present a few recommendations from the perspective of organizers and the mentoring participants themselves.
The organizers’ perspective
Opening and closing the program in an in-person format
Above all, when organizing an online mentoring program, it is nevertheless worth organizing its opening and possibly also an official closing in an in-person format. This is an excellent opportunity to establish relationships within mentor-mentee pairs. Moreover, it is also a chance to build relationships more broadly – within the network among mentors and between mentees. A further benefit of such meetings is building the brand of the mentoring program, and promoting the organizers or the individuals or companies involved in its organization.
Onboarding participants into the program
An important element of online mentoring is also the appropriate onboarding of participants – most often already in the form of online workshops and training sessions. Both mentors and mentees should become familiar with the program’s objectives, as well as the fundamentals of mentoring itself. They should understand their roles and what they should and should not do. It is also worthwhile during such meetings to engage participants more, for example by organizing group work (in virtual breakout rooms), which offers a good opportunity for networking and also makes the workshops more engaging.
Intervision sessions for mentors
We also recommend organizing intervision sessions for mentors. Intervision sessions should be held regardless of the mentoring format. However, in the case of online programs this is even more important due to the limited opportunity for natural conversations among mentors. Intervisions are meetings among mentors, during which they have the opportunity to share their experiences from the process (of course maintaining confidentiality), give each other guidance and share best practices. Again, besides their training character, such meetings also serve as networking opportunities.
Ongoing monitoring of mentoring processes
Organizers, regardless of the form of mentoring, should have a basic overview of what is happening across the entire program so they can respond as events unfold. Mentoring is effective only when both parties – Mentor and Mentee – engage in the process, which ideally should self-regulate bottom-up and automatically. Nevertheless, from experience we know that to make a mentoring program effective it is sometimes worth gently nudging participants to act or, in cases of obvious lack of engagement, closing the given process.
It is therefore good when organizers have visibility into at least the basic parameters of how the mentoring program is progressing – for example whether pairs are meeting, whether they have signed a contract, and what stage of the process they are at. They should also intervene when it is clear that a given pair is experiencing problems – for example, no meetings for more than 30 days. This is especially important in a remote format, where online contact can still be a barrier for some.
Attention to the formal closure of the process and its summary
The final piece of advice for organizers of online mentoring programs is to clearly communicate to participants the need for a formal closure of the process and a summary. For a mentoring process to be effective, it is necessary on the one hand to strive toward the goal (defined during the initial sessions), but it is equally important to actually achieve that goal or to decide at some point that it cannot be achieved. The mentoring process should take a closed form, with reflection, a summary and an agreement on next steps.
The perspective of Mentors and Mentees
Below are a few suggestions for what participants in online mentoring programs can do to make their processes as effective as possible.
Agreement on the meeting format
First, the mentoring pair should agree in the first session on how they will meet — whether online or remote, how frequently, whether offline meetings are also an option, if so when, and which tools they will use to organize meetings. This is theoretically a trivial but very important element that defines the framework for further collaboration. It can help avoid later misunderstandings that, in an online format, often only become apparent after some time.
Turning on the camera during meetings
The second tip concerns the meetings themselves and the necessity of turning on the camera during them. Visual cues are an important element of interpersonal communication. By seeing each other, people can better read emotions, observe engagement and attentiveness, and are more motivated to actively participate in the meeting.
100% attentiveness
It is also very important to consciously maintain full attentiveness during the meeting. During an online conversation, the risk of distraction and limited participation is much greater than in an in-person meeting. It is worth turning off all notifications on your computer, closing unnecessary tabs, putting your phone somewhere away, and participating in the meeting 100%.
A place for sharing knowledge
Finally, a technical recommendation — it is worth agreeing on a place to share knowledge and to “archive” the process. This can be, for example, Google Drive, an open document edited by both people, or a dedicated tool such as Mentiway. The idea is to have a single place where the pair stores materials related to sessions, or more broadly to the achievement of a given development goal, where they record homework, meeting dates, and joint notes. This makes the process more effective and organized, and after some time both people can return to the process and draw their own conclusions.
Online mentoring with Mentiway
Finally, a few words about how Mentiway supports online mentoring processes.
Mentiway is a platform created with mentoring in mind, including remote mentoring. It serves as a single tool that integrates most of the issues mentioned above. Thanks to its features, it supports mentoring processes – including online ones – for organizers as well as for mentors and mentees.
Among other things, thanks to:
- providing an online space for program information and participant recruitment,
- real-time process monitoring for organizers through pair meeting statuses, information on signed agreements, and completed evaluation surveys,
- communication modules between organizers and participants, as well as between participants within mentoring pairs,
- scheduling meetings, calendar integration, and process organization,
- a space for sharing knowledge — both from organizers and privately within a pair, or with access restricted to the authors of the uploaded materials,
- generating a summary of the mentoring process in the form of a PDF report.
All this in one place – available online on an ongoing basis from anywhere in the world and from any device.
Hi, my name is Thomas. I am the Co-Founder of Mentiway. We are happy to share our knowledge and support organisations on their way to success! 💪 If you are interested in how to efficiently and effectively implement a mentoring programme in your organisation using technology:
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