When you’re a global organization of around 1000 employees, building a successful mentorship program is no small task

We recently sat down with Katie Fernandes, Global Employee Experience Team Lead at AppDirect, to learn more about how she and her team run a program that — despite the many nuances and challenges they have to navigate — garners overwhelmingly positive feedback.

The Details

Mentorship cycles at AppDirect happen twice a year, with each cycle running for four months.

During a cycle, mentors and mentees are matched as a pair and encouraged to meet twice a month for half an hour. While this meeting cadence is not a requirement, this recommendation provides guidance for mentor/mentee pairs to reference while having flexibility to set their own schedules together.

The program has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

“We know that everybody’s time is so valuable, both for our mentors and mentees,” Katie shared, while explaining the structure. “If they want to keep the relationship going, that’s up to them, but we do want to make a very clear and established ending date for the cycle.”

Senior leadership has been supportive of the program from its early days, with many participating as mentors. This involvement is an important endorsement of the program’s impact, and also emphasizes the importance of clear expectations around timing and duration — as many mentors have quite full calendars.

The Challenge of Scale & The Importance of Planning Ahead

A mentorship program scaled for an organization of AppDirect’s size involves a significant amount of coordination and asset creation. It’s essential to plan ahead.

Once the timing of the mentorship cycles and program duration are established, a workback schedule (a style of project planning that works backwards from a fixed deadline) and SOP (“standard operating procedure” with step-by-step instructions) are created. These will include every task and deadline of the process, from promotion, to the creation of assets like future feedback forms, to matchmaking.

“I would say the biggest challenge, is following up with mentors and mentees to make sure that they’re prioritizing the commitment and relationship. Everyone’s time is so valuable, so for mentors to give up an hour a month is pretty important. We have a lot of our senior leaders act as mentors. It’s such a great opportunity,” Katie shared. “So when I hear that maybe the mentee is not following up or getting the relationship started, just making sure that I am doing my part to get them going, get them unstuck”.

Lead with Thoughtfulness

When it comes down to it, mentorship programs — where people are matched in the pursuit of personal development — are a deeply human process, and the process of matchmaking is no exception.

“As far as making the matches, I wish I could say it was a lot of science, but there definitely is more art to it,” Katie said.

In AppDirect’s mentorship sign up forms, future mentors and mentees are asked to select three different “focus areas” to ensure pairings share interests or goals. There are also open-ended questions such as asking mentees what they’re looking for in a mentor, alongside space in the form to add further details.

For team members in L&D and Employee Experience, Katie spoke to leveraging that knowledge in matchmaking.

“If you know that there’s a mentor who would be a good fit for a mentee based on some verbatim [input shared on the form] or based on personalities, take that into consideration. At AppDirect, we’re also very thoughtful about time zones. We have employees on the West coast all the way to India. So we want to be very thoughtful to make sure that we give these matches and these pairs the best opportunity to connect for those monthly meetings.”

She also spoke of considering pairing mentors and mentees from different functions who maybe haven’t interacted much previously, as one of the goals of AppDirect’s Mentorship Program is to develop interdepartmental relationships. It’s also important to be mindful of pairing high potential employees with strong mentors who will be a good match.

Thoughtfulness doesn’t stop at matchmaking. It’s important for Katie and her team to make sure mentors and mentees are set up for success and supported with material.

They’ve built role-specific program guides in the form of slide decks for mentors and mentees. Cohorts also have access to a Confluence page with material, including introductory guides to Donut.

Participants receive further resources via Donut messages, such as TED talks and articles, and suggested guides and toolkits.

Lastly, a “deep dive” session is put on all participants calendars to discuss the program and how it will work.

The Results 

Feedback (collected twice over the four-month period) from mentors and mentees from AppDirect’s most recent cycle was over 90% positive.

“I think that’s great feedback for us, just knowing that what we’re doing is landing. It’s sticking, and people are connecting with it,” Katie said.

She also cited seeing repeat mentors joining the program as an important result. “We’ve had a lot of people who have joined the program cycle after cycle.”

Employee engagement is also a positive signal, with survey scores related to Learning and Development having gone up after the program kickoff.

By balancing structure with flexibility and thoughtfulness, AppDirect has built a successful program that promises continued success.

 

Start building your own mentorship program with Donut’s Prebuilt Journeys, featuring suggested content, structure, and feedback collection.