By Helen Luketic, CHRP

Starting a new mentorship program at your organization?  Thinking about how to measure your program’s success?

As with measuring anything in HR, there is no hard and fast rule on what you should be tracking.  However, there is a three step process you should follow to choose your metrics and report them: 

1.    The metrics should be directly linked to the goals of the program.

Start by listing all the reasons why you’re starting this mentorship program.  The results you want to achieve can be tangible or intangible benefits for the employee or the organization.  For example:

Benefits to the Employee:

• career development
• increase job satisfaction
• decrease anxiety and facilitate the onboarding of new employees or newly promoted employees
• build connections or a network throughout the organization
• gain insight to the organizational culture and politics

Benefits to the Organization:

• increase employee retention, particularly with new hires or newly promoted employee
• increase knowledge of the organization, certain lines of business, or organizational politics
• increase productivity
• increase engagement
• develop a culture of learning
• facilitate knowledge transfer
• strengthen the employer brand
• create opportunities for coaching
• build connections with senior leaders and employees
• increase bench strength, build talent from within, possibly part of a larger succession planning program
• identify potential leaders

Like a good brainstorming session, list all the benefits of the mentorship program first without considering how you will actually measure the results.  You will only limit your thinking if you start worrying about how to track the results.

2.    Decide whether the mentorships will be informal (unstructured) or whether it will be a formal (structured) program.

You should only measure that which you can control and action.  An informal mentorship is left to an employee to manage so it doesn’t follow a pre-determined process.  Because there is no formal process and no controllable result, there is no value to measuring.  However a formal or structured mentorship program tends to have set goals, schedules and an evaluation process.  As such, the program can be monitored by measuring the process for efficiencies, employee satisfaction, and impact to HR or organization strategy, and ultimately to the bottom line.

3.    Choose your success measures.

If you’ve decided on a structured program, you’ve listed the goals of the program and who will benefit from participation. Now it’s time to choose your measures.  Here’s a sample of what you may want to track. This list is by no means is exhaustive:

Focus on only a few well chosen measures – two or three at the most could tell the whole story on whether or not the program is a success and what needs to improve.  (If you’re looking for metric formulas and standards to use, BC HRMA will be releasing their HR Metrics & Standards in mid-November. Stay tuned.)

Once the metrics have been chosen, create your targets.  For example, if you are trying to increase engagement, you will want to specify by how much you want engagement to increase.  Remember your SMART goals.

Next, decide who will collect the data, how often data will be collected, who will receive the results, and who is accountable for the results.  Declare upfront what you plan to do if the results are off-target.  Then, document these details so everyone involved is aware of and can follow the process.

Finally, don’t forget to ask the mentors and mentees themselves how satisfied they are with the program, whether or not it met their expectations and how they think could be improved.  This satisfaction measure will compliment your metrics and add to the story of your success!

Now your measures are linked to your goals, you’ve got targets to work towards, your results are actionable, and everyone understands their roles and responsibilities.  With your combination of quantitative and qualitative data, you’re ready to report your success to the rest of the organization!

Helen Luketic, CHRP brings more than nine years of HR experience to her current role as HRIS Analyst at Vancity, where she’s assisting the organization implement new HR systems and processes. For her innovative achievements at Vancity, Helen was the recipient of BC HRMA’s 2008 Rising Star Award. In her previous role as Manager, HR Metrics & Research at BC HRMA, she combined her CHRP, B.A. in Economics, HR information systems knowledge and experience in HR metrics to develop the HR Metrics Service and related workshops, presentations and webinars to teach HR professionals about HR metrics and benchmarking.