What is a peer to peer mentor?
In a traditional mentorship, a senior employee helps a junior employee with guidance at work, offering advice and helping the mentee excel at the company. The traditional workplace mentorship is similar to a teacher and student relationship, although less rigid, as there isn’t formal instruction.
With a peer to peer mentorship, however, both workers are at similar or slightly different levels in the company. In this type of mentorship, the two workers are colleagues. The mentor helps the mentee, often a new hire, to learn the ropes and understand how the organization operates, both logistically and in terms of corporate culture.
Mentoring peers is an intentional relationship—that is, your company purposely brings together a mentor and mentee rather than expecting these relationships to happen organically.
Benefits of peer mentorships
Because peer mentorships can help develop employees, teach them new skills and keep them around longer, it’s to your benefit to make sure these types of mentorship arrangements are taking place throughout your company.
Here are some key benefits of encouraging robust peer to peer mentorships at your company.
Employee recruitment
A peer to peer mentorship program does not just help current employees—it can also be an effective recruitment tool. In the best-case scenario, potential employees are joining your organization for more than just a paycheck. The decisive factor for employees making the jump from their old company to yours is the chance to join a company they feel good working at and to grow professionally.
Telling potential new hires about your strong mentorship program and highlighting how this can nurture their career and help them advance is an excellent soft benefit to be able to point to.
Onboarding
A peer to peer mentorship that starts as soon as the new hire joins your company is a great way to onboard workers. Similar to a student on the first day at a new school, a fresh hire might be looking around and wondering who everyone is and how things work. Peer to peer mentorshipplays an important socializing role in easing a new hire’s possible anxiety and making them feel part of the team.
Employee retention and engagement
Fostering a strong sense that your organization values employee development is crucial for the long-term success of any business. How crucial is it? A recent Pew Research survey shows the top two reasons for leaving a company are tied: 63% said that their top reasons for quitting were low pay and a lack of advancement opportunities.
A peer to peer mentorship gives employees a sense of belonging at your organization and the chance to grow and advance. It can be just as critical to your employee retention efforts as ensuring your employees are properly compensated.
It’s important to note too that employee engagement goes both ways here: Not only does the mentee feel they are a welcome part of the organization, but the peer mentor can draw a sense of professional and personal satisfaction knowing they’re helping a colleague and the company. That, in turn, can lead to greater retention of those doing the peer mentoring.
Employee growth
Peer to peer mentorships help your organization create its next generation of managers and leaders. When you develop junior employees and give them a reason to stick around, you are positioning them to grow in their careers and at your company. These employees in turn may become managers and mentors themselves.
Institutional knowledge
No matter how established your company’s systems, workflows and policies are, most organizations have ways of performing tasks and processes which aren’t necessarily written down or formalized. These aspects of how the company runs aren’t found in employee handbooks or official internal documents; they are often best practices and ways of doing things that a team has discovered over the years through trial and error. A peer mentor can be helpful in making theirmentee understand this sort of intangible company knowledge.
This can also extend to unofficial ways of doing things at work that revolve around colleagues’ personalities and preferences. At the core of every company is people, and people of course all have different ways they like to run things. For example, a peer mentor might inform their mentee that during the weekly content strategy meeting, their supervisor likes the meeting to run efficiently and doesn’t appreciate when the conversation veers into chit-chat. That’s not the sort of thing that gets codified in formal company literature, but knowing about it will help newer employees understand and navigate their workplace more smoothly.
FAQs
How do you encourage peer mentorships at work?
Some peer to peer mentorships may happen organically when two colleagues get along well and one employee takes the lead as a peer mentor. More likely, though, you will need to start a mentor program to encourage colleagues to become both mentors and mentees.
The mentor program should clearly communicate expectations to both the mentor and mentee. It should be announced both on internal channels and on bulletin boards around the office. If potential participants don’t know about the mentorship program, it will have little chance of success, However, posting signage and announcing it can encourage participation.
How can I foster peer to peermentorships in a virtual work environment?
With an increase in remote work, it’s more important than ever for new and junior employees who are working remotely to feel part of the team. Just because an employee is physically out of sight doesn’t mean they should be out of mind when it comes to helping them via a peer to peer mentorship. In fact, the rise of remote work might be even more of a reason to have a robust peer to peer mentorship program: Mentorship can help keep employees engaged who might otherwise feel a distant connection to their new workplace due to not being physically present in an office.
The good news is that peer to peer mentorships can be facilitated using the same tools your workers are likely already using to hold meetings and communicate on a daily basis.
Once or twice a week, peer mentors can have quick check-ins with their mentees over Zoom (or whatever video chat platform your company uses). If your company also uses a chat program such as Teams or Slack, the mentor should let the mentee know that they are available to chat. They should also routinely take a “temperature check” on their mentee using these chat programs. If your company doesn’t use a chat program, a weekly email check-in is a great way to keep the lines of communication open between mentor and mentee.
