The best tools for organizing a mentoring program

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The organization of a mentoring program, whether we are talking about a company, university or other organization, is a process and requires a certain process approach. Especially with a large scale counting the number of participants, it can be a bit of a challenge. In such cases, it is worth taking advantage of tools that can begin to optimize the process. Both for the organizers and for the participants – Mentors, Mentees and Mentees.

In this article, I will present some tools that can facilitate the process of implementing, managing and evaluating a mentoring program, and which are even necessary when organizing programs on a larger scale (as early as more than 10 pairs).

1. Mentiway – a dedicated platform for organizing a mentoring program

First, I have included a tool in the form of a platform dedicated to precisely this purpose of organizing and managing a mentoring program.

Mentiway, as an example of this type of tool, provides the greatest opportunities and time savings, while significantly simplifying the entire process by gathering all functionality and data in one place.

The Mentiway platform already includes all the tools I list below, among them are:

• Ready-to-go functionality related to the launch of the program – information website, recruitment forms, mechanisms for pairing participants into mentoring pairs.
• An extensive knowledge base and a number of mechanisms to help participants implement the idea of mentoring and carry out processes according to standards.
• Functionalities to support participants during the process, making it easier and faster to organize meetings – session calendar, scheduling, notes, summaries, ready suggested points to be raised at each session.
• Ability to monitor processes on an ongoing basis and summarize the entire program at its conclusion.

For more on the Mentiway mentoring platform, click here.

2. Google / Microsoft Forms – recruiting participants

Every mentoring program, from the point of view of the participants, begins with an information phase and the recruitment of Mentors, Mentees and Mentorees. In the case of a few people, one can probably be tempted to collect applications by email or even in person, but with as few as a dozen or a few dozen potential participants, it is necessary to use a tool to streamline recruitment. Solutions included in the Google Workspace or Office 365 office systems can come to the rescue. These are Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, respectively.

Both tools provide the ability to create surveys with any list of questions, divided into pages, taking into account the different types of answers given. Both tools also allow you to export post-recruitment data to spreadsheets, making it easier to collect and analyze submissions.

When recruiting for a mentoring program (whether through forms or not), it is a good idea to ask, among other things:

• previous experience in the program – based on this you can decide on additional training,
• department in the company – on this basis you can try to pair people from different teams,
• company position level,
• areas for development for Mentees and those whose knowledge can be shared by Mentors – the list of both sets of areas should be the same and their comparison is the most effective way to automatically suggest mentoring pairs.

Here you can read more about stages of the mentoring program.

3. Excel – pairing

The next step in the mentoring program is pairing. Here, you can either use Mentees’ selection of Mentors (about that in a moment) or manually pair participants based on the completed forms.

For the second option, probably the only effective solution is to simply Excel and develop your own method of connecting participants. This probably involves filtering the submissions, matching them by competency areas or building your own scoring. Unfortunately, at a larger scale, the number of possible pair combinations is so large that combining them manually even using Excel is very complicated and can take long hours. Even with just 10 Mentors and 10 Mentees, you can create as many as several million pair possibilities.

In the Mentiway tool, we rely on a proprietary pooling mechanism using scoring and running hundreds of thousands of simulations in search of the distribution of participants that best combines the needs of Mentees with the capabilities of Mentors.

4. Airtable – selection of Mentors by Mentees

An alternative to manual matching is to give participants the opportunity to choose their own pairs. Mentees’ selection of Mentors is the most common.

In order to enable such a process, it is necessary to make Mentors’ enrollment data available to Mentees. Here you can either use the company’s internal intranet, or use tools that facilitate the management and visualization of such data sets.

An example is Airtable. Here you can quite easily import Mentors’ data and display it, for example, as zoomable cards and assign any activity – such as sending an email or running a custom script.

5. Calendar – monitoring meetings

We know from experience that mentoring requires conscious participants with a high level of motivation and willingness to develop. However, it happens that even motivated people have a worse time and need contact and gentle motivation. It also happens that during mentoring processes problems arise that couples are unable to handle on their own. Organizers should therefore constantly monitor mentoring processes and respond if they notice such challenges.

Here we have to choose from basically two types of tools.

The first is to calendar and monitor whether mentoring meetings are being implemented in pairs. It is good practice to possibly respond and contact the mentoring pair if there is more than 30 days between meetings.

The second tool is simply to contact each program participant directly and get feedback on meetings held, estimated level of commitment to the mentoring program and satisfaction with the sessions. Such conversations are worth having at least twice per process.

In the Mentiway paltform, organizers have a live view of the list of mentoring pairs with information on when the last meeting took place and how participants rate their satisfaction with the session.

6. Google Drive / Dropbox – sharing materials

A mentoring program will also find it useful to have a tool or place to share materials. Typically, these are presentations from trainings and workshops. I think the bare minimum here is to provide mentoring couples with such materials as:

• contract in the mentoring process,
• Principles of ethics and basic principles of trial conduct,
• A presentation providing an introduction to mentoring, explaining what mentoring is, the roles and responsibilities of the Mentor / Mentee, etc.

Often during the mentoring program, organizers invite participants to other training sessions related to their needs. It’s a good idea to put the materials from these meetings in an easily accessible place for participants, too.

7. Google / Microsoft Forms – exit polls

Finally, we return to the previously mentioned forms from Google or Microsoft, but this time concerning the collection of feedback on the program. Before the mentoring program officially ends, it is a good idea to conduct a survey among the participants to evaluate the program, summarize it and gather lessons for the future.

In such a survey, it is worth asking about:

• The degree to which the goals in the program have been achieved,
• opinion on the whole process,
• Opinion on the degree of satisfaction with the organizers’ preparation for the process,
• It is also worth giving space for statements regarding possible improvements for future editions of the program.

In conclusion

In the article, I presented some ideas for tools you can use to help organize a mentoring program, especially if it includes 10 or more mentoring pairs. I hope some of them will inspire you.

At the same time, I encourage you to check out the mentoring platform Mentiway, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is dedicated to managing a mentoring program and meets all the objectives for the aforementioned tools.