Employee engagement is critical to business success. While many organizations invest in pay, perks, and workplace culture to boost engagement, one powerful yet often overlooked tool is mentorship.
Traditionally viewed as a career advancement strategy, mentorship has far greater potential. It can serve as a foundation for deeper employee connection, clarity, and commitment. However, it’s frequently treated as a secondary initiative, sidelined in favor of other perceived drivers of engagement.
Why aren’t employees engaged?
By the middle of 2023, only 34% of U.S. full- and part-time employees were engaged in their work and workplace, down from 40% in 2020, according to Gallup. This equates to nearly 10 million U.S. workers feeling less engaged in just a three-year period.
The employee engagement crisis really kicked into high gear post-COVID. Several changes stemming from the pandemic conspired to create an environment unfriendly to employees seeking reasons to stay afloat in a chaotic workplace.
Gallup found that COVID’s greatest impact was seen in one extremely crucial area: knowing what to do at work. Understanding what is expected of you at work is “the most fundamental engagement element,” Gallup noted, showing in one poll that workers are lagging in this area as compared with 2020. This is particularly apparent among younger workers, only 45% of whom clearly know what is expected of them at work – down a shocking 7% from 2020.
Also hampering work environments in the post-COVID world are the mass resignations during the early days of the pandemic, which led to the restructuring of teams into groups lacking familiarity with one another. Meanwhile, customer expectations continued to shift further in the direction of immediate gratification, meaning that employees now have more job responsibilities than previously expected. And 70% of managers reported having no formal training on how to lead a hybrid team.
All of this, combined with employees’ confusion in understanding their work expectations, has led to a crisis of engagement. Mentoring is well-equipped to address these issues, but companies still fail to see this.
Why companies don’t view mentorship as important to employee engagement
Many companies believe in a simple recipe to keep employees engaged: good pay and a friendly environment. But employees need more than that to truly thrive and deliver optimal results.
Polls consistently show that employees want their companies to provide them with a sense of purpose and meaning in their work. They want a genuine, diverse environment that empowers them to feel confident to be their unique selves.
And, crucially, many of them want to develop meaningful relationships, especially with someone they can identify as a mentor.
So why don’t companies invest in meaningful mentorship, and why is mentorship consistently overlooked in the employee engagement equation? Well, according to Gallup, companies often view mentoring as “an HR thing.”
To many companies, employee engagement should be quantified by surface-level metrics, such as satisfaction with compensation. Because of this, they often fail to invest in engagement in a way that communicates its importance to employees. The issue then snowballs, as organizations can wrongly assume they’ve exhausted all engagement options before they have invested properly.
In essence, companies don’t view mentorship as important to engagement because they never give mentorship the time and investment necessary to see results in the first place. This is reflected once again by Gallup, showing that nearly 80% of employees worldwide are still not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, despite more effort from companies.
Understanding mentorship’s impact
Measuring mentorship’s impact on employee engagement is the key to understanding its utility. Take this 2019 CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Survey, which found that 90% of employees with a career mentor are satisfied at work, with another 57% reportedly “very” satisfied. But when an employee does not have a mentor at work, both of those figures dropped by double digits. Meanwhile, workers younger than 45 who have a mentor report being satisfied with their job by margins of up to 20 percentage points higher than workers of the same age who do not have mentors.
While 84% of Fortune 500 companies have a mentorship program in place, it remains clear that mentorship is not viewed as a boon for employee engagement. The conversation must change, reframed in a way that addresses the issue. Employee engagement and mentorship are two sides of same coin – neither can exist in their fullest form without the other.
There are many ways in which a company can fix a failing mentorship program. Measuring quantitative outcomes is a critical aspect of this.
But perhaps more important is the recognition that the issue even exists. As stated earlier, a vast reckoning is necessary in order to transform mentorship programs from “an HR thing” into a crucial part of the employee engagement equation.
Change is possible
Mentorship and employee engagement are deeply intertwined. Companies that ignore this connection risk losing their best, most dedicated workers. To foster a culture where employees feel seen, supported, and motivated, organizations must elevate mentorship from a peripheral initiative to a central business strategy. Engagement begins with connection, and mentorship is the bridge that makes it possible.
