Mentoring programs are often part of a range of tools available for staff to speed up their career development. If their value at an individual level is undisputable, what about the return on investment for the company? A study conducted on new recruits at a call center shows that programs that operate on a voluntary basis have a much lower return on investment than those that are compulsory, even if the latter only last a few weeks.

The reason behind this is a bias in the recruitment process of the participants: the people who request to benefit from these programs often already show high levels of self-motivation and a strong awareness of their perfectibility. They thus benefit from mentoring but would probably have found another way to progress. On the contrary, the people who are less clear-sighted about their competences, or less motivated, rarely volunteer for these programs. The latter’s impact on their progression curve would nonetheless be significantly higher—and consequently, the impact on the collective performance would be multiplied.

A learning to keep in mind when designing your mentoring programs.

Source: Why Your Mentoring Program Should Be Mandatory, Harvard Business Review, September-October 2022.