What to Pay Attention to When Organising a Mentoring Programme

A practical checklist for mentoring programme organisers: from purpose, recruitment and matching to quality standards, tools, monitoring and evaluation.

A mentoring programme can be a highly effective tool for developing employees, students, members of organisations or entire communities. Simply bringing mentors and mentees together, however, is not enough to produce the expected results.

A good mentoring programme should be designed as a complete process – from defining its purpose and rules, through recruitment and matching, to participant preparation, monitoring the relationships and evaluating outcomes.

Maintaining high standards of mentoring is particularly important. Even very experienced mentors and highly motivated mentees may fail to use the programme's full potential if they do not know what a good mentoring relationship should look like, what the responsibilities of both parties are, and which tools and techniques they can use during successive sessions.

So what should you pay attention to when planning a mentoring programme?

1. Start by answering the question: why are we organising mentoring?

One of the first mistakes is to begin with mentor recruitment or with choosing a tool for running the programme. The first step should be to define its purpose.

A mentoring programme can support, among other things:

• employee skills development,
• preparing talent for new roles and developing future leaders,
• knowledge transfer between more and less experienced people,
• support for specific employee groups,
• retention and engagement,
• a culture of knowledge sharing,
• community integration,
• career development for students and graduates,
• the mission of a foundation, association or professional organisation.

The purpose of the programme will influence almost every decision that follows: the target group, recruitment, mentor selection criteria, matching rules, programme length and the way results are measured.

It is therefore worth answering a few questions at the outset: what do we want to achieve, who is the programme for, which development needs should it address, what kind of mentors do we need, how long should it run, and how will we know that it has succeeded?

2. Design the entire process, not just recruitment and matching

It is easy to reduce a mentoring programme to a simple sequence: recruitment → matching → a few meetings → a final survey. A professional programme, however, requires the entire participant journey to be designed in advance.

Plan in particular:

• programme rules, policies and schedule,
• recruitment, eligibility criteria and the data collected from mentors and mentees,
• preparation of both participant groups,
• matching criteria and rules,
• how pairs begin working together and the mentoring agreement,
• goal setting and the expected frequency of sessions,
• communication, materials and supporting tools,
• engagement activities and a procedure for responding to problems,
• monitoring, evaluation and the formal close of the programme.

This turns mentoring from a collection of loosely connected relationships into a structured development process.

If you are looking for a more detailed description of each stage, read “Mentoring program in a company – how to design, implement, and develop it? A practical HR guide”. It is a useful companion for organisers who want to work through the entire implementation process step by step.

3. Focus on the right participants, not only on participant numbers

A large number of applications is not in itself a measure of programme quality. When selecting mentors, professional experience should not be treated as the only criterion.

A good mentor needs relevant knowledge and experience, but also the ability to support another person's development without taking responsibility for that person's decisions.

Look at motivation, willingness to meet regularly, active listening, the ability to ask useful questions and give feedback, openness to different perspectives, and experience that corresponds to potential mentees' needs.

The same applies to mentees: they need a genuine development need, motivation and readiness to participate actively in the process.

4. Pay particular attention to matching

Matching is one of the most sensitive stages of a mentoring programme. It should not consist only of matching a mentee's job title with a mentor's professional background.

Depending on the programme, consider:

• the mentee's development goals,
• the mentor's skills and experience,
• industry or specialisation,
• areas of interest and expectations of the process,
• participant preferences and availability,
• potential conflicts of interest.

With dozens or hundreds of participants, manual matching quickly becomes time-consuming. Decide during recruitment which information will actually be needed to make good matching decisions.

Even the best match cannot guarantee that every relationship will work. The programme should anticipate this and make it clear who participants can contact, how they can report a problem, and how rematching can be handled.

5. Do not assume that participants already know what good mentoring looks like

This is one of the most important elements of a professional programme. Professional experience does not automatically mean mentoring experience.

A mentor can be an excellent expert or manager and still not know how to facilitate a mentoring relationship. A mentee, in turn, may expect the mentor to provide ready-made answers and tell them what to do.

The organiser should ensure that participants understand:

• what mentoring is and how it differs from training, coaching, consulting or management,
• the respective roles of mentor and mentee,
• who is responsible for goals and for the mentee's decisions,
• what an effective mentoring session can look like,
• why confidentiality, trust and good feedback matter.

Do not leave this to chance. A professional programme should provide at least clear introductory materials and, ideally, onboarding, a webinar or training before the process starts.

6. Give participants access to mentoring techniques and tools

Knowing what mentoring is is only the beginning. Participants – especially those taking part for the first time – may simply not know what to do in the next meeting.

The organiser can significantly improve quality by providing practical tools such as:

• a mentoring agreement template,
• a goal-setting form,
• prompt questions and a sample agenda for the first session,
• techniques for defining problems and working with goals,
• conversation models and self-reflection tools,
• feedback materials,
• questions for reviewing progress and preparing for the next session.

High mentoring standards depend not only on the quality of the participants, but also on the quality of the environment the organiser creates around them.

7. Use a mentoring agreement

At the beginning of the relationship, each pair should agree on the basic rules of cooperation. A mentoring agreement does not have to be a complicated legal document – its main role is to clarify expectations.

It is worth agreeing on confidentiality, meeting frequency and duration, scheduling, contact between sessions, the responsibilities of both parties, note-taking, the expected level of commitment, how feedback will be given, and the rules for withdrawing from or ending the process.

Such agreements prevent many potential problems before they arise.

8. Teach participants to work with goals

Mentoring without a goal can easily become a series of interesting but disconnected conversations. Participants should enter the process with at least a general idea of what they want to work on.

The organiser can support them with a goal-setting methodology, examples of well-formulated mentoring goals, forms for recording them and a way to review progress regularly.

Encourage pairs to return periodically to the questions: Where were we at the beginning? Where are we now? What has changed? What do we still want to achieve?

9. Do not leave participants on their own after matching

A common problem is intensive support before launch followed by almost no contact once pairs have been created. In reality, matching is not the end of the organiser's work – it is the beginning of the actual mentoring process.

During the programme, monitor whether pairs have started working together, whether meetings are taking place regularly, whether participants remain active, whether goals have been set, whether problems are emerging and whether additional support is required.

This does not mean interfering with the content of mentoring conversations. Confidentiality should remain a foundation of the relationship. The organiser does, however, need enough information to notice that a pair has not met for several weeks and respond before the final survey.

10. Plan activities that sustain engagement

A programme lasting several months will naturally go through periods of higher and lower engagement. Useful support can include regular communications, reminders, educational materials, additional workshops, community meetings, networking, a midpoint session, peer supervision or supervision for mentors, and consultations for participants who encounter difficulties.

It is also worth planning a formal programme launch and close. These events give structure to the process, strengthen the sense of taking part in a shared initiative and create space for community building.

11. Set a quality standard for the whole programme

A professional programme should not be judged solely by the number of pairs created. Define a minimum standard that applies to all participants.

It may include:

• mandatory participant preparation and acceptance of programme rules,
• a mentoring agreement,
• a defined goal for the process,
• a minimum number or frequency of meetings,
• access to appropriate materials, techniques and tools,
• regular work on goals,
• access to organiser support,
• process evaluation.

This means that programme quality does not depend only on which mentor or mentee someone happens to be paired with.

12. Use technology instead of managing everything manually

A mentoring programme can be run using forms, spreadsheets, email, presentations and calendars. That may work for a small group, but as the programme grows, so do the volumes of data, forms, messages, possible pair combinations, sessions, goals, surveys and administrative tasks.

It is therefore worth considering a dedicated mentoring programme platform such as Mentiway.

Mentiway supports organisers and participants across many stages of the process – from recruitment and matching through onboarding, the mentoring agreement and goal work to sessions, mentoring tools, programme monitoring and evaluation. As a result, many processes that would otherwise have to be handled manually can be automated or supported by the system.

There is also an important quality benefit: it standardises the participant experience. Mentors and mentees receive a common process, rules, materials, techniques and tools, while the organiser can focus on programme quality and intervene where support is genuinely needed.

Technology will not replace a good mentor–mentee relationship, but it can create much better conditions for that relationship to develop and reduce a large share of the administrative workload.

13. Measure outcomes, not only activity

Participant and session counts are useful indicators, but they do not yet answer the question whether the programme was effective.

Activity

• number of mentors and mentees,
• number of pairs created,
• number of sessions and meeting regularity.

Engagement and process quality

• participant activity,
• matching ratings and relationship satisfaction,
• use of materials and tools,
• number of pairs requiring support.

Outcomes

• degree of goal achievement,
• reported competence development and usefulness of acquired knowledge,
• willingness to participate again and recommend the programme.

Depending on the programme's purpose, these measures can be supplemented with longer-term organisational indicators.

14. Treat the first edition as a source of data

The first edition will probably not be perfect – and it does not need to be. More important is creating a mechanism that allows the organisation to learn from it.

After the programme, review whether the objective was well defined, whether the right participants applied, whether mentors and mentees were adequately prepared, how well matching worked, which tools were missing, when engagement declined, how organiser communication was rated and what should change before the next edition.

A good evaluation means that each subsequent edition can be better than the one before it.

What deserves particular attention? A short organiser checklist

Before launching the programme, check that:

• the programme has a clearly defined purpose and target group,
• you have designed the entire process, not only recruitment,
• participant selection and matching criteria are clear,
• mentors and mentees understand their roles and will be prepared for participation,
• clear rules and a mentoring agreement are in place,
• participants know how to work with goals,
• they have access to mentoring techniques and tools,
• there is a mechanism for reporting problems and rematching,
• you can monitor programme health without breaching conversation confidentiality,
• engagement activities have been planned,
• success measures and evaluation methods have been defined.

A good mentoring programme requires an environment, not just a connection between people

The organiser's most important job is not to control every mentoring relationship. It is to create the conditions in which mentor and mentee can build a valuable, safe and development-focused relationship.

That means good programme design, participant selection and matching, but also clear standards, knowledge, tools, techniques and support throughout the process.

The more professionally this environment is prepared, the less programme quality depends on chance. That is when mentoring can become not a one-off initiative but a repeatable, scalable and valuable part of developing people and the organisation as a whole.