In recent years, organizational mentoring has gone online, following the lead of many other procedures. Is that a good thing? Yes, of course! Does online mentoring carry the risk of automating a process that shouldn’t be automated, given that it is a personal development process? A simple “no” is the response.
When done properly, online mentoring makes it simpler for businesses to assist staff in forming relationships, facilitating cooperation within those relationships, tracking progress, and evaluating the effectiveness of those interactions. Still being a personal activity, mentoring concentrates on the unique learning requirements of the people involved. The technology is only a tool that enables companies to scale the mentoring practice, increasing the impact and return on investment for both the participants and the organization.
Organizations can employ various strategies when utilizing a software platform for mentoring, just like any other technology. Which prompts the question: What constitutes a mentoring platform’s core components? Read on to find out more!
Five components that should make up a mentoring platform!
1. Participant Profiles: Don’t Overlook the “Basic” Profile
Mentees and mentors must have user profiles in the mentoring platform that include basic demographic data, such as their job title, department, location, contact information, and work history. This profile information should be collected upfront to be useful in other stages of the mentoring process. The stages include:
- Finding and matching mentors and mentees.
- Comprehending the backgrounds of other collaborators.
- Enabling administrators to filter reports quickly to understand impacts across various organizational divisions.
Because users frequently want to “get on with the business” of using the software system, profiling is frequently seen as a “boring” need of those systems. They are requested to give simple demographic data about themselves that the organization already has. Mentoring platforms should link with systems of record so data may be moved from the master record into the mentoring system, preventing users from skipping the profiling process. It enables fields to be pre-populated with the necessary data for users. Users’ attention can then move to choose the competencies and talents they can mentor others in or desire to develop, which is crucial for the matching process.
2. Program Parameters: Uniqueness of the mentoring platform
The majority of businesses use mentoring platforms to cater to the developmental requirements of their staff at various stages of the employee lifecycle. As a result, more than one developmental program (such as leadership development, onboarding, or high-potential development) will eventually incorporate mentoring into its structure. Each program is likely to have different requirements. On a program-by-program basis, a competent mentoring provider will allow for flexibility.
Things organizations should be able to configure as a mentoring platform
- Audience Limitations
- Relationship Types
- Matching
- Communication/Announcements
- Content
3. Matching Capabilities: The Magic Behind the Scenes
An organization can adopt various matching processes based on programming needs using a well-organized mentoring platform. Self-directed, administrator, and facilitator matching should be among them. These matches are not made based on speculation. A mentoring platform must have a strong matching algorithm that can take advantage of user profile data and make suggestions to those making matches. The matches should be valuable to a business.
4. Collaboration Tools: Mentoring is More than the Match
Participants need to be supported by the system after being matched, whether in one-on-one or group partnerships. Because of this, a mentoring platform must have capabilities that let participants work together. Mentees and mentors should be able to send messages, ask and answer questions, share documents and links, plan events, and suggest or assign learning assignments to support the developmental dialogues. All of these should be recorded in an accessible history so that users can examine their teamwork in the future and develop an ongoing learning resource.
5. Monitoring and Reports: That Which Gets Measured Gets Done
Accountability is essential to a mentor’s effectiveness. Monitoring progress in mentoring relationships can be trickier because the program administrator typically doesn’t have direct access to the collaboration, even though accountability in some development interventions is straightforward to measure (e.g., class attendance and exam scores).
Therefore, mentoring platforms should offer integrated tools that enable administrators to track advancement throughout the relationship and assess it at its conclusion. Administrators should be free to choose the degree of accountability and associated metrics that are necessary (and possibly unique) for each of those programs and then be able to collect and access the data that is consistent with those particular metrics.
Lastly,
It might be a little intimidating when you think about the crucial elements of a mentoring platform. Any software should exist to make users’ lives easier. Because there is a demand for mentoring software in the market, mature vendors have figured out how to consider each vital element, making life easier for participants and administrators.
To help you improve your personal and professional perspectives, AskMe gives you access to a select network of world-class experts. Access our world-class expert directory to get top-notch interactive assistance at your fingertips!
