How to Improve Employee Wellbeing Through Mentoring

Mentoring is a highly valuable practice for both mentor and mentee. That’s a fact.

Mentorship is an opportunity to hear from someone who has already travelled the same path as you, receive guidance in tackling challenges, and gain constructive feedback on areas of improvement. Not only that, but it is also an opportunity for both mentor and mentee to broaden their perspectives, develop new skills and explore ideas.

More importantly, mentorship allows the mentee to have a safe and confidential place to talk about their objectives without judgement or criticism. All in all, it’s an investment in personal growth and professional development that will bear significant returns over time.

But it’s not just about career progression. Mentoring has lasting benefits for employee wellbeing too, which in turn boosts employee engagement and productivity.

How access to mentoring improves employee wellbeing

Let’s delve into each of the ways that mentorship can boost your employee wellbeing in more detail: 

1. Be a reliable source of guidance and wisdom

Employee mentorship programs provide an opportunity to speak to someone with an unbiased perspective on any situation you may face. This allows you to look at issues from multiple perspectives and receive honest feedback.

With their extensive experience, mentors can offer credible and trustworthy advice to help you better yourself. The level of expertise they’ve built through the years enables you to make the most of potential opportunities while helping you create a plan of action to achieve your goals. This provides the safety and reassurance of knowing that you have someone on your team to guide you, reducing stress and improving resilience. 

📖 Find out more about building trust in mentorship here 📖

2. Give access to resources for furthering growth and career opportunities

A well-connected mentor can give you access to exclusive events, networks, and industry knowledge, which you wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain. Moreover, mentoring can provide a strong foundation for your long-term professional development by giving you the necessary tools and advice for your ambitions.

This improves well-being by validating mentees skills and competencies through opportunity. Mentee’s confidence will increase as they learn and grow. It’s also a great way to remove systemic barriers and create a more equitable working environment – which has a positive impact on performance for you and your company. 

3. Increase motivation and accountability

Having periodic check-ins with your mentor adds another layer of accountability to reaching your goals. This serves as strong motivation when making changes or overcoming obstacles related to any area of your life. If you’re feeling stuck in a rut professionally or emotionally, talking things through with someone who can provide clear insight can prove incredibly beneficial in moving beyond roadblocks. A mentor’s guidance helps us persist and remain inspired to achieve our goals. 

📖 Mentoring is also an impactful way to support people returning to work, find out more in our guide to returnships 📖

4. Provide emotional validation during tough times

Mentors may also provide support during difficult times and transitions at work. They can equip you with suitable coping strategies or provide emotional validation to triumph over life’s challenges. By securing the space and opportunity for you to reflect and process events or experiences with greater clarity, mentorship can bolster self-awareness and facilitate acceptance. All of these can ultimately enhance your overall emotional health.

📖 Find out more about how mentoring improves mental health in our guide 📖

5. Help you build confidence

By teaching the skill of active listening, mentors can help you understand yourself on a deeper level and help you improve your communication skills. With their valuable advice, mentors can offer support without judgment, empowering individuals to reach their full potential without fear of failure or criticism. This is known as psychological safety, an essential in mentoring. 

Their trustworthiness can give you the courage to take risks safely. Slowly but surely, your confidence in your abilities will increase as you overcome more and more obstacles to your personal growth.

📖 Find out more about the top mentoring skills needed in our guide 📖

6. Encourage you to practice self-care

A mentor can remind you that taking care of your well-being is paramount for employee mental health. A mentor can help you manage stress, stay emotionally healthy, and become more in tune with your goals and needs. Likewise, they can advise you on setting boundaries at work that reduce stress and protect wellbeing. 

A mentor can help you develop self-care practices such as:

• Taking time for yourself every day
• Learning to say “no” when needed
• Developing healthy habits, such as learning new skills or celebrating achievements
• Creating a distraction-free environment to focus on tasks
• Prioritising important projects and managing workload 

7. Enable you to set realistic goals

Mentoring also empowers us to set achievable objectives tailored to our individual needs. They can provide a structure you can use to assess your strengths and weaknesses accurately. Through honest conversations, a mentor will help you identify any potential obstacles or challenges ahead and develop strategies for overcoming them.

More importantly, they will help us realise that it takes time to achieve a goal, that it’s the consistent and small steps that will eventually get you there. The rewards of reaching our goals are huge and can be highly beneficial to our wellbeing. 

8. Help you safely explore different paths in life

Mentoring provides expert guidance to think outside our comfort zone and become aware of different opportunities we may not have considered before. It offers an opportunity for safe exploration by allowing us to try out activities that can aid career development or personal growth with robust support from an experienced source. In addition, a mentor can introduce new techniques to learn from mistakes rather than avoiding them. This encourages strategic risk-taking where necessary, leading us down a path toward success.

There we have it, the top ways that mentoring can boost your employee wellbeing. To maximise the impact of mentoring on your wellbeing, you need to identify what attributes make an individual the right fit for a mentor. Finding someone that resonates with your own values is key. Common qualities to look out for in a mentor are wisdom, integrity, availability, curiosity, authenticity, and sincerity. When paired with understanding and active listening skills, this person has the potential to become an invaluable resource for personal growth within the realm of mental health and wellness.

Want to learn more? If you’re looking to start a mentoring program to improve your employee wellbeing, talk to Guider.