Who benefits most from company mentorship programmes?

Who benefits most from company mentorship programmes?

US researchers designed a program to see whether mentored employees performed better than non-mentored employees.

Employees who were automatically signed up to be mentored, performed the best.

It suggests that those less inclined to volunteer for a mentorship tend to be the ones who can get the most out of it.



Quartz’s cross-departmental mentorship program has a relatively high participation rate. Yet each year there is a last-minute scramble to encourage employees who could benefit from the program to sign up. As one of the organizers, I’ll admit that I’ve occasionally thought: What if people didn’t get to choose whether or not to participate in mentorship?

Our company won’t have a mandatory mentorship program anytime soon—we want to empower our employees to decide to volunteer, and it’s our responsibility to create an environment where they feel supported in doing so. But the question of who might benefit from a required mentorship program is an interesting one, and was recently explored in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.



Researchers designed a four-week mentorship program and divided new hires at a US sales call center into two groups: those who were automatically enrolled and randomly paired