One of the best ways to improve at something is by learning from someone who’s already done it. Mentorship can be a cheat code to accelerate growth, especially within an organization’s team—top performers can mentor others and thus create a high-performing workplace culture.
Mentorship in corporate America is not new, and companies such as T-Mobile understand the importance of mentorship and use it to increase employee retention, as highlighted in a recent Fortune article. When the telecommunications company merged with Sprint in April 2020, human resources leaders from each organization knew it could be a chaotic transition. They decided to use mentorship as a way to help employees learn from each other and create a smoother merger, Cathy Nelson, senior manager of talent management at T-Mobile, told Fortune. The results from their mentorship program efforts provide an example for growth-focused organizations.
T-Mobile’s mentorship program is designed to allow early-stage employees to learn from employees with more experience.As told to Fortune, the company found that the mentorship participants were 26% more likely to change job levels in the previous 12 months. The program has fostered a success mindset and led to an increase in employee retention by 37%, according to Fortune’s reporting.
Here’s a look at successful organizational mentorship programs, how businesses can model mentorship within their company, examples of thriving organizations thanks to mentorship and advice from workplace culture experts.
Mentorship creates high-performing teams and intrapreneurship
T-Mobile leadership knew mentorship was important, but what they didn’t expect was how the program would affect employee retention. Those who participated in the mentorship program had a 78% retention rate, while those who did not only had a 41% retention rate, as reported by Fortune. Mentorship played a key role in bringing together over 70,000 employees into cohesive teams, Nelson told Fortune.
Melanie Hall, a licensed clinical professional counselor, therapist and coach, says that one of the best reasons to create mentorship programs is to help boost confidence and encouragement for employees.
“It gives them good problem-solving skills,” Hall says. “It also helps them move up within the company. It gives them a middleman between the job that they’re doing and leadership. Most people want upward mobility. This often helps them with that upward mobility… and it helps them assimilate to the culture a little bit better as well.”
T-Mobile isn’t the only organization that has leveraged the effectiveness of mentorship programs. As one of the world’s largest organizations, Google offers a variety of mentorship programs that help its teams immerse themselves in Google’s culture, learn and develop as team members.
Mentorship programs foster intrapreneurship, meaning career professionals think and act like an entrepreneur within their role at a company. Intrapreneurship creates a high-performing workplace culture as individuals take more responsibility for the success of an organization.
Tech giant Apple has a mentorship program called Diversity Network Associations, which has 67 employee-led chapters and 55,000 members worldwide. Amazon is another organization using mentorship programs to create high-performing teams and increase employee retention.
Mentorship programs foster an entrepreneurial mindset and intrapreneurship as employees work together to grow and create performance-focused teams.
Leverage software to streamline mentorship
According to Fortune’s reporting, T-Mobile used Chronus software to manage its mentorship program. This technology allowed T-Mobile to bring people together virtually and make connections with mentors, Nelson told Fortune.
Much of what we do for work these days is online, and software makes it easier to create mentorship relationships that can work in any setting. You can use a range of software products for your organization without purchasing a software company. In recent years, Skool has become popular for creating communities—including mentorship programs. Other options include using the Chronus platform, Qooper, Together and a host of other available software.
Nelson told Fortune that employees build profiles on the software, which can then match them with mentors throughout the company across various teams and departments. In the case of T-Mobile, roughly 7,000 employees have profiles on the mentorship software they use, and about 2,000 have used it to make mentoring connections.
Set clear goals and boundaries for your mentorship program
According to Gallup, U.S. employee engagement improved slightly in 2024, rising from 30% to 32% after hitting an 11-year low in the first quarter of 2024. Disengaged employees affect team performance and ultimately affect an organization’s bottom line.
Mentorship programs effectively engage employees and give them the professional development tools they need to thrive in the workplace.
Your mentorship program will need clear goals for your organization and for employees to set. You’ll need to know what you hope to achieve from the program and be able to suggest goals for those participating in mentorship, as this may be their first experience with professional development.
Your mentorship program will also need boundaries. You’ll want to ensure the level of involvement, access and contact between employees is safe and doesn’t feel like a burden. Boundaries also help combat employee disengagement.
Deirdre Orr, an HR consultant and founder of Deirdre Orr Consulting, says that organizations should start with the end goal in mind and think outside the box with pairing.
“A lot of mentorship programs try to pair people together that are in like fields or like interests,” Orr says. “But what I encourage my clients to [do is] kind of think outside the box as well to provide developmental opportunities for people.”
She advises pairing up employees with different learning opportunities because it broadens their horizons and allows them to utilize other skill sets, gain experience in other roles and learn different ways of thinking about the organization and its growth.
“Another tip for a very successful mentorship program is aligning it with [the] company goals, initiatives [and] mission, because in order to get people to participate in [a] mentorship program, it really helps to kind of have something to back it to where they know that they’re influencing something or they’re adding value to… the organization,” Orr says.
Employee mentorship creates organizational growth
Shan Thomas, a business consultant, says employee mentorship is hugely important.
“No one really trains you on how to navigate corporate spaces, and corporate just works a little differently,” Thomas says. “You come straight out of school, you go to college and then you think you have the skills and the tools and the techniques to go and be successful in corporate. But every company has a different culture. They have different norms. There are different soft skills that need to be honed.”
If your organization doesn’t have a mentorship program, this can be a great addition to your workplace culture initiatives. Mentorship helps give everyone within your organization their best opportunity to thrive.
Photo from fizkes/Shutterstock.com.
