Onboarding new employees is not just too much work for the organization itself but employees. The paperwork, orientation, and then introductions are too much. For 58% of the organization, the onboarding consists of paperwork and traditional processes only. 

Have you thought about improving your onboarding approach? With a great onboarding program, employee retention can be improved by 82%. This means an organization must go one step ahead and design an onboarding new employee mentoring program.

Mentoring for onboarding provides new hires with all the necessary tools for functioning well and adapting to the organization quickly. A mentor is assigned to each mentee for peer mentoring. This promotes a great employee experience from the start. This is how the program benefits the mentee as well as the organization:

• Increased self-confidence 
• Quick adaptation to the organization and its culture 
• Learn any missing skills through the mentor’s expertise 
• Ready for development 
• Better employee engagement 
• Employee loyalty 

How to Design a Mentoring Program for Onboarding 

The steps for designing an onboarding new employee mentoring program is pretty much the same as it’s for designing a mentoring program for talent and career development. However, some tweaks are applied. Here are some steps to get started with: 

Outline the Onboarding Objectives

These objectives include improving employee guidance, increased retention, more productivity. Figure out the goals for your new hires and jot them down.

Choose the Mentor

The next step involves choosing a mentor. Here, reverse mentoring won’t be useful because the mentee is completely new and he doesn’t know much about the new organization. So, choose a mentor based on their experience, skills, competencies, career level, etc.

Determine When to Introduce the Mentor

It’s very important to introduce the mentor at the right time. Ideally, skill development should benefit after the new hire has started his job. The mentees should be given time to wet their feet and come up with questions. 

Make Information Accessible Online

Take advantage of the mentoring software to help your new employees in getting started. It’s best to have some basic information available online. The new hire must know about their job role as well as their role as a mentee. At the same time, they should be able to find information on their mentors. This way, the new hires would know what’s expected of them. They won’t have to be confused or rely on others to answer their questions. 

Get Feedback

Feedback helps measure the success of the onboarding new employee mentoring program. This should let you whether the mentoring outcomes align with the objectives of the program. Ideally, get feedback from the mentees too. They might have a useful insight to share for improving the program.

Track and Measure the Outcome

Just as you would measure the outcome of Mentoring for graduate recruitment programs, you must measure the outcome of the onboarding mentoring program as well. The mentoring software will facilitate that. You can extract reports to track the success and share the information with your stakeholders, if necessary.