Mentorship & Employee Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is most often (and rightfully) tracked by trends. Indeed, because there are other factors that are not easily measured by surveys involved in whether or not employees will stay, are happy with the company, etc., the exact satisfaction scores themselves are not always nearly as important as how those scores change over time. If they go down, it’s a bad sign.

If they go up, it’s a good sign. Then those numbers can also be correlated with other changes in the company. Changes are most often thought of in terms of changing current employee satisfaction levels.

But not all trends may need to involve the idea that current employee satisfaction levels need to go up. Another option is to work on improving the starting satisfaction levels of new hires, and seeing if that translates to better production down the road.

One possibility that has been suggested by some experts is the idea that a mentorship program may be a good way to improve satisfaction. These programs are not designed to improve current employee satisfaction. Rather, they are designed to drastically decrease pressure on new hires while also teaching them how to succeed in the job (and possibly preparing them for a career in the company).

Studies have shown that mentorship programs performed correctly can lead to a great deal of success down the road, and more satisfaction from the employee. This should, in theory, improve the trends in your employee satisfaction, because while the current employees may not change their options as quickly as you would like, new employees will feel far more welcomed into the company and start off on presumably a positive note.

As with most satisfaction measurements, however, it’s impossible to know with certainty that this will improve satisfaction scores. It should, as it is both a logical reason to assume satisfaction scores will increase, as well as a generally proven one, but it’s certainly not a guarantee.

But even if the satisfaction scores don’t increase, mentorship programs may still have many different benefits, and may change the way you read your scores in the future. Sometimes it is not about whether or not you improve satisfaction. Rather, it is about improving what those scores actually mean in terms of production, and then trying to maintain the best possible score within your business.