Introducing Phenom Mentoring: Elevating Employee Experience & Creating Meaningful Connections at Scale

In today’s competitive job market, employee engagement has emerged as a critical driver for retaining top talent and attracting best-fit candidates. Companies that prioritize employee development — embedding it as a key pillar in their strategic workforce plans — increase productivity, improve quality of work, and ultimately influence their future success.

One way to help employees learn and evolve? A well-functioning mentorship program that supports employees in their professional growth.

To make it easier for employers to implement or level up their existing mentoring programs, we’re excited to announce Phenom Mentoring — a new Employee Experience product that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to connect employees and experienced leaders seeking a mentor-mentee relationship.

Read the press release here >

Why mentorships matter — and how Phenom can help

Meaningful mentorships enable employees to learn and develop by building one-to-one relationships with internal leaders, increasing knowledge, and building skills for future goals and milestones. A mentor serves as a teacher, counselor, and advocate to a mentee, resulting in a mutually beneficial professional relationship over time.

Phenom Mentoring simplifies and optimizes the matching process, pairing mentors and mentees based on their skills, career paths, location, goals, and mentoring styles. As a result, organizations boost employee engagement, support onboarding, and accelerate career growth and success. With Mentoring, all employees have equal opportunity to:

• Discover AI-recommended available mentors based on suggested criteria
• Request a compatible mentor to help them reach clearly defined goals
• Initiate and manage mentorships within Phenom’s talent experience platform
• Track mentorship goals, objectives, session summaries, and resources
• Build 1:1 connections to foster hard and soft skills and navigate career paths

Here’s a sneak peek at how it works:

A Match Made in Artificial Intelligence

Matching the right mentor with the right mentee is at the core of every successful mentoring program. Without collecting the right data from both mentors and mentees, however, a mentoring program can become frustrating for everyone due to poor communication, lack of commitment, personality differences, perceived (or real) competition, conflicts of interest, the mentor’s lack of experience and the list goes on.

Within the employee portal via Phenom Employee Experience, AI matching connects mentors with mentees faster based on skills, career paths, and goals.

Through the collaborative portal, employees are given the controls to build a personalized relationship tailored to their individual needs, skills, goals, objectives, and career path. Mentors can easily set up their profile, highlighting key areas where they can help mentees. Mentees can then request a mentor based on areas where they want to improve, as well as goals they’d like to achieve. Simple as that!

AI and machine learning ensure the mentoring program not only powers matching capabilities, but also improves the quality and productivity of mentoring relationships.

Easily Stay Connected

If there's anything the current pandemic has taught us, it’s how interconnected we all are — and how vital those interpersonal connections are to our well-being and professional growth. Whether you're a mentor or a mentee, keeping the communication open is vital to creating stronger and more meaningful professional relationships.

With email and in-app notifications in Phenom Mentoring, mentors and mentees can easily connect, share their progress and stay aligned, focusing the participants’ conversations on their needs, obstacles, and challenges. Participants can also leverage the portal to manage goals, session summaries, and resources.

Measure Mentoring Success

Mentoring is above all a relationship. But how do you measure the impacts of a relationship? The measurement of mentoring programs can be challenging, particularly with respect to goals and outcome metrics — both of which are essential to determining a program's effectiveness.

Properly identifying metrics and providing a link between mentoring and specific goals or outcomes highlights the importance of mentoring for individuals and the organization.

One proven outcome of a successful mentoring program for example is an improvement in engagement. If the mentees are active and responding well, that means the program is on track. You can also scale the mentoring program and align expectations through session summaries and set realistic career and development goals that revolve around what participants expect to accomplish.

With Phenom Mentoring, employees can easily capture, organize, and track goals and session summaries in a central location. By keeping objectives top of mind and measuring progress after each session, everyone can remain aligned.

Beyond the match: Supporting a more inclusive workplace

Mentoring is a vehicle to drive Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), multigenerational employee retention, engagement, knowledge transfer, onboarding, and leadership legacies. Not only does it connect all employees, it also allows them to learn from each other, while complementing existing training programs designed to help employees learn new skills and meet new objectives.

The benefits go a long way:

• Creating a pathway to DE&I: When pairing diverse matches — whether by gender, race/ethnicity, or other variables — mentors and mentees learn from one another, reducing potential stereotypes and augmenting their DE&I knowledge.
  
• Upskilling your employees: It can cost as much as six times more to hire from the outside than to grow from within. By upskilling employees, you’re closing skills gaps and fulfilling critical needs of the business.

Designing a fulfilling employee experience

Employees today are consumers of the workplace. Many are no longer satisfied with simplify clocking in and out — they’re constantly looking for growth and development opportunities that will help evolve their careers.

Within Phenom’s Employee Experience, Mentoring adds a critical component to a robust talent marketplace that gives employees full access to determine their career trajectory, discover open roles, gain new skills, seek out real-world work experiences, and network with relevant groups.

Infused with Phenom AI and machine learning to deliver personalized recommendations and content, Phenom Employee Experience includes an array of tools to help organizations transform their people, such as Career Pathing, Internal Mobility, Learning and Development, Gigs, Employee Resource Groups, D&I, and Referrals.

Whether you’re building an effective workplace mentoring program, or taking your existing program to the next level, now's the time to drive employee engagement and future-proof your workforce.

Explore how Phenom Mentoring can help organizations increase employee engagement, nurture emerging talent, and build a stronger, more cohesive company culture.

To learn more, join us for a live Phenom Mentoring demo on July 8!

Register now